HOME PLACE

1937

Rachel Cazalet always woke early, but in summer, in the country, she woke with the dawn chorus. Then, in the silence that followed, she drank a cup of tea from the Thermos by her bed, ate a Marie biscuit, read another chapter of Sparkenbroke, which was all rather intense, she thought, though well written, and then, as the bright grey light began to fill the room (she slept with her curtains undrawn to get the maximum fresh air) making the light from her bedside seem a dirty yellow – almost squalid – she switched it off, got out of bed, put on her woolly dressing gown and her shapeless slippers (extraordinary the way in which they ended up looking the shape of broad beans) and crept along the wide, silent passages and down three steps to the bathroom. This room, facing north, had walls in tongue-and-groove pitch pine painted a dark green. It was always, even in summer, as cold as a larder, and it looked like a privileged horse’s loose box. The bath standing on its cast-iron lion’s feet had a viridian-coloured stain from water that dripped from ancient brass and china taps whose washers were never quite right. She ran a bath, placed the cork mat in position, and bolted the door. The mat had warped so that it wobbled when she stood on it; still, it was to be the children’s bathroom and that wasn’t the kind of thing they’d mind. The Duchy said it was still a perfectly good mat. The Duchy did not believe that baths were meant to be pleasant: the water should be tepid, ‘Much better for you, darling,’ the soap was Lifebuoy, just as the lavatory paper was Izal, ‘More hygienic, darling.’ At thirty-eight Rachel felt that she could have her bath unsuitably hot, and use a cake of Pears’ transparent soap that she kept in her sponge bag. It was the grandchildren who bore the brunt of health and hygiene. It was lovely that they were all coming; it meant that there was masses to do. She adored her three brothers equally, but for different reasons – Hugh because he had been knocked up in the war and was so brave and uncomplaining about it, Edward because he was so wonderfully good-looking, like the Brig when he was young, she thought, and Rupert because he was a marvellous painter, and because he’d had such a tragic time when Isobel died, and because he was such a wonderful father, and sweet to Zoë who was … very young and chiefly because he made her laugh so much. But she loved them all equally, of course, just as – and also of course – she didn’t have a favourite with the children who were growing up so fast. She had loved them most when they were babies, but they were nice as children, and often said the most killing things. And she got on well with her sisters-in-law, except, perhaps, she didn’t feel she knew Zoë very well yet. It must be difficult for her coming late into such a large, close-knit family with all its customs and traditions and jokes that needed to be explained to her. She resolved to be particularly kind to Zoë – and also to Clary, who was turning into rather a dumpling, poor darling, although she had lovely eyes.

By now she had put on her suspenders, her camisole, her petticoat, her lock-knit knickers and coffee-coloured openwork worsted brown stockings and her brown brogues that Tonbridge polished until they were like treacle toffee. She decided on the blue jersey suit today (blue was far and away her favourite colour) with her new Macclesfield silk shirt – blue with a darker blue stripe. She brushed out her hair and wound it into a loose bun which she pinned to the back of her head without looking in the glass. She strapped on the gold watch the Brig had given her when she was twenty-one, and pinned the garnet brooch that S had given her for a birthday, soon after they had met. She wore it every day – used no other jewellery. Eventually, she took a reluctant peep into the mirror. She had fine skin, eyes that were sharp with intelligence and humour; in fact, her nice, but not remarkable, face – a little like a pallid chimpanzee, she sometimes said – was utterly unselfconscious and entirely without vanity. She tucked a small white handkerchief into the gold chain of her wrist-watch, picked up the lists she had accumulated throughout the previous day and went down to breakfast.

The house had originally been a small farmhouse, built towards the end of the seventeenth century in the typical Sussex manner, its front timber and plaster up to the first floor, which was faced with rose-coloured overlapping tiles. All that remained of it were two small rooms on the ground floor, between which was a steep little staircase that faced the front door that led to three bedrooms linked by two closets. At some time, its owner had been a Mr Home, and it was known simply as Home’s Place. Somewhere in the 1800s this cottage had been transformed into a gentleman’s house. Two large wings had been built on either side of it to form three parts of a square, and here honey-coloured stone had been used with large sash windows and roofed with smooth blue slate. One wing added large dining and drawing rooms, and a third room whose purposes had varied – it was currently used for billiards; the other comprised kitchen, servants’ hall, scullery, pantry, larders, and wine cellar. This addition also provided eight more bedrooms on the first floor. The Victorians completed the north side of the square with a series of small dark rooms, which were used for servants’ quarters, a boot room, a gun room, a room for the vast and noisy boiler, an extra bathroom and a WC below, and nurseries above with the bathroom already mentioned. The result of these various architectural aspirations was a rambling muddle built round a hall with a staircase that led to an open gallery from which the bedrooms could be reached. This open well, with its ceiling just short of the roof, was lit from two glass domes that leaked freakishly in bad weather causing buckets and dogs’ bowls to be placed strategically. It was cold in summer and icy the rest of the year. The house was heated by log and coal fires in the ground-floor rooms; some of the bedrooms had fireplaces, but the Duchy regarded them as unnecessary except for an invalid. There were two bathrooms, one for the women and children on the first floor, one for the men (and servants once a week) on the ground. The servants had their own WC; the rest of the household shared the two that adjoined the bathrooms. Hot water for bedrooms was drawn from the housemaids’ sink on the first floor and carried to rooms in steaming brass cans every morning.

Breakfast was in the small parlour in the cottage part of the house. The Duchy was Victorian about her drawing and dining rooms, using the latter only for dinner and the former not at all, unless there was company. Rachel’s parents sat now at the gate-legged table on which the Duchy was making tea from the kettle that boiled over a spirit lamp. William Cazalet sat with a plate of eggs and bacon and the Morning Post propped up against the marmalade. He was dressed in riding clothes that included a lemon-coloured waistcoat and a wide dark silk tie with a pearl pin in it. He read his paper with a monocle screwing up the other eye so that his bushy white brow almost touched his ruddy cheekbone. The Duchy, dressed much as her daughter but with a mother-of-pearl and sapphire cross slung on a chain over her silk blouse, filled the silver teapot and received her daughter’s kiss, emanating a little draught of violets.

‘Good morning, darling. I’m afraid they are all going to have a very hot day for their journey.’

Rachel dropped a kiss on the top of her father’s head and sat in her place, where she saw at once that there was a letter from S.

‘Ring for some more toast, would you?’

‘Iniquitous!’ William growled. He did not say what was iniquitous, and neither his wife nor his daughter asked him, knowing very well that if they did, he would tell them not to worry their pretty little heads about that. He treated his newspaper as a recalcitrant colleague with whom he could always (fortunately) have the last word.

Rachel accepted her cup of tea, decided to enjoy her letter later, and put it in her pocket. When Eileen, their parlourmaid in London, arrived with the toast, the Duchy said, ‘Eileen, would you tell Tonbridge that I’ll want him at ten to go to Battle and that I’ll see Mrs Cripps in half an hour?’

‘Very good, m’m.’

‘Duchy dear, wouldn’t you like me to do Battle for you?’

The Duchy looked up from scraping a very little butter on her toast. ‘No, thank you, darling. I want to speak to Crowhurst about his lamb. And I have to go to Till’s: I need a new trug and secateurs. I’ll leave the bedrooms to you. Did you make a plan?’

Rachel picked up her list. ‘I thought Hugh and Sybil in the Blue Room, Edward and Villy in the Paeony Room. Zoë and Rupert in the Indian Room, Nanny and Lydia in the night nursery, the two boys in the old day nursery, Louise and Polly in the Pink Room, and Ellen and Neville in the back spare …’

The Duchy thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Clarissa?’

‘Oh, Lord! We’ll have to put a camp bed in the Pink Room for her.’

‘I think she’d like that. She’ll want to be with the older girls. Will, shall I tell Tonbridge about the station?’

‘You tell him, Kitty m’dear. I’ve got a meeting with Sampson.’

‘I think we’ll have lunch early today, so that the maids will have time to clear it and lay tea in the hall. Will that suit you?’

‘Anything you say.’ He got to his feet and tramped off to his study to light his pipe and finish his paper.

‘What will he do when he’s finished all the building here?’

The Duchy looked at her daughter and answered simply, ‘He’ll never finish. There’ll always be something. If you’ve time, you might pick the raspberries, but don’t overdo it.’

‘Don’t you.’

But with seventeen people coming to stay, there was a great deal to do. The Duchy spent a businesslike half hour with Mrs Cripps. She sat in the chair pulled out for her at the large, scrubbed kitchen table, while Mrs Cripps, arms folded, leant her bulk against the range. While the menus for the weekend were being arranged, Billy, the gardener’s boy, arrived with two large trugs filled with peas, broad beans and Cos lettuces. He set them down on the scullery floor, and then stood speechless staring at Mrs Cripps and the Duchy.

‘Excuse me, m’m. What do you want, then, Billy?’

‘Mr McAlpine said to bring back the trugs for the potatoes.’ He spoke in a whisper; his voice was breaking, which embarrassed him. He had also lately taken to staring at ladies.

‘Dottie!’ Mrs Cripps used her most refined shout. When Madam wasn’t around, she screeched. ‘Dottie! Where is that girl?’

‘She’s out the back.’ This meant the lavatory, as Mrs Cripps well knew.

‘Excuse me, m’m,’ she said again, and made for the scullery.

When she had emptied the trugs and thrust them at Billy with instructions to bring back tomatoes with the potatoes, she returned to the business of meals. The Duchy inspected the remains of a boiling fowl that Mrs Cripps did not think could be stretched into rissoles for lunch, but Madam said that with an extra egg and more breadcrumbs it could be made to do. They fought their regular battle over a cheese soufflé. Mrs Cripps, who had got her place as a plain cook, had, none the less, recently mastered the art of making soufflés and liked to make them on any serious occasion. The Duchy disapproved of cooked cheese at night. In the end, they compromised on a chocolate soufflé for pudding as they would only be nine at night in the dining room. ‘It will be eleven for luncheon tomorrow, as two of the children will be with us, and that will mean eight in the hall.’

And ten in the kitchen, thought Mrs Cripps.

‘And the salmon for tonight? Is that standing up to this weather?’ (William had been given a salmon by one of his friends at the Club.)

‘It’ll have to be cold, m’m. I’m poaching it this morning, to be on the safe side.’

‘That will be very good.’

‘And I’ve put cucumbers on the list, m’m. McAlpine says ours aren’t ready.’

‘How tiresome! Well, Mrs Cripps, I mustn’t keep you: I know you have a great deal to do. I’m sure everything will be quite satisfactory.’

And she went, leaving Mrs Cripps to make four pounds of pastry, poach the salmon, get two huge rice puddings into the oven, mix a Madeira cake and a batch of flapjacks and strip and mince the chicken for the rissoles. Dottie, who emerged as soon as she heard the Duchy leave, was scolded and set to shelling peas, scraping ten pounds of potatoes and cleaning out the vast churn that would hold the eighteen pints of fresh milk to be delivered from the neighbouring farm. ‘And mind you scald it when you’ve cleaned it out or we’ll have the milk turning on us.’

Upstairs, the housemaids, Bertha and Peggy, were making up the beds – the two four-posters for Mr and Mrs Hugh and Edward, the smaller double for Mr and Mrs Rupert, the five little iron beds with thin, sinewy mattresses for the older children, the nurses’ beds, the large cot for Neville, and the camp bed for Lydia. Rachel came upon them in the Pink Room and told them that another camp bed would be needed for Miss Clarissa. She then doled out the requisite number of bath and hand towels for these rooms, and settled the question of how many chamber pots would be required. ‘I think two for each of the children’s dormitories, and one for each of the other rooms. Have we enough?’ she added with a smile.

‘Only if we use the one that Madam doesn’t like.’

‘You can put that in Mr Rupert’s room. Don’t give it to the children, Bertha.’

The day nursery and the Pink Room had linoleum on the floor, and gingham curtains made by the Duchy on her ancient Singer on rainy afternoons. The furniture was white painted deal; the light was a single ceiling bulb with a white glass shade. They were children’s rooms. Those of her brothers and sisters-in-law were better appointed. Here were squares of hair-cord carpet with a stained and polished wood surround, and in the Paeony Room, a Turkey carpet with the same. The furniture was mahogany; there were dressing tables with wing mirrors and white crocheted cloths and marble washstand tables with china pitchers and bowls to match. The Blue Room had a chaise-longue; Rachel had put Hugh and Sybil there so that Sybil could put her feet up if she felt inclined. The thought of a new baby was tremendously exciting. Really, she adored babies, particularly when they were new. She loved the underwater movements of their hands, the fastidious pursing of their cherry pink mouths, their slaty eyes that tried to see you, and then became aloof. They were darlings, all of them. Rachel was Honorary Secretary of an institution called the Babies’ Hotel that cared for temporarily or chronically unwanted babies up to the age of five. If parents, mainly musical or theatrical, went on tour, they could leave their baby there and the payment was modest. The babies who simply turned up, wrapped in blankets or sometimes newspaper in a cardboard box, were looked after free: the hotel was a charitable organisation with a full-time sister and matron. To provide staff and further augment their slender finances, they trained young girls to become children’s nurses. She loved the work and felt it to be useful, the thing she wanted to do more than anything else in the world, and, as she would never have children of her own, it gave her access to a steady stream of babies, all in need of love and attention. Part of her work was to help the unwanted babies to be adopted, and it was awful to watch how, as they got older, their chances went down. It was sometimes very sad.

She was going through the grown-ups’ rooms, looking to see that the drawers had clean lining paper, that the quilted biscuit boxes by the bedside tables contained Marie biscuits, that the bottles of Malvern water were full, that the hanging cupboards had a fair number of coat-hangers – all things that, when she returned from Battle, she could tell the Duchy had been done and thus save her from fussing. The biscuits had become quite silent, crumbly and unappetising. She collected the boxes and took them down to the pantry to be refilled.

Mrs Cripps, balancing a large pie dish on the flat of her left hand, was slashing surplus pastry from the edges with a black knife. When Rachel gave her the message for Eileen, she said that the old biscuits would do for the girls’ middle mornings. The kitchen was very hot. Mrs Cripps’s remarkable complexion – a greenish yellow – was shiny with sweat, her straight, greasy black hair was escaping in strands from outsize kirby-grips and the way in which she squinted at the pie down her long pointed nose made her look more like an overblown witch than usual. Pastry lay in moony slabs on the floured table, but her sausage-coloured fingers were not white beyond the knuckles: she had what was known as a very light hand. Seeing the pie reminded Rachel of the raspberries and she asked for a container to put them in.

‘The fruit basket is in the larder, miss. I’ve sent Dottie out for some parsley.’ She meant that she did not want to fetch the basket, but knew that Miss Rachel should not have to.

‘I’ll get it,’ Rachel said at once, as Mrs Cripps knew she would.

The larder was cool and rather dark with a window covered with fine zinc mesh, in front of which hung two heavily infested fly papers. Food in every stage of its life lay on the long marble slab: the remains of a joint under a cage made of muslin, pieces of rice puddings and blancmange on kitchen plates, junket setting in a cut-glass bowl, old, crazed, discoloured jugs filled with gravy and stock, stewed prunes in a pudding basin and, in the coldest place beneath the window, the huge, silvery salmon, its eye torpid from recent poaching, lay like a grounded zeppelin. The fruit basket was on the slate floor, the paper that lined it red and magenta with juice.

As she opened the front door and stepped into what had been the old cottage garden she was assailed by the heat, by the sound of bees and the motor mower, by honeysuckle and lavender and the nameless old-fashioned climbing rose of ivory peach colour that was thickly wreathed round the porch. The Duchy’s rockery, her latest pride and joy, was blazing with little mats and cushions and sparks of flowers. She turned right and followed the path round the house. On the west side was a steep bank that ended in the tennis court that McAlpine was mowing. He wore his straw hat with a black band, trousers as round as drainpipes, and, in spite of the heat, his jacket. This was because he was in view of the house; he took it off in the vegetable garden. He saw her and stopped, in case she wanted to say anything to him. ‘Lovely day,’ she called and he touched his forehead in acknowledgement. Lovely for some, he thought. He was fond of lawns, but a tennis court got messed up in no time with them all trampling about on it. He couldn’t trust Billy with the mower – he seized up as soon as he looked at it – but was worrying about his leeks and grudged the time plodding up and down emptying grass clippings into his barrow. He approved of Miss Rachel, however, and did not mind her picking his raspberries as he saw from her basket she was about to do. She never left the cage open, like some he could mention. She was a nice, straight lady, although too thin; she ought to have married, unless it was just not in her nature. He looked at the sun. Nearly time to get a good cup of tea off Mrs Cripps; she was a sharp one, make no mistake, but she made a tidy cup of tea …

Billy, crouched on the path that ran between the main herbaceous borders, was clipping the grass edgings. He was awkward with the shears, opening them too wide and slashing with fierce ineptitude. He had to clip the same place several times to get it neat, but Mr McAlpine would be after him if he didn’t. Sometimes he caught a piece of turf that came away with the shears, and then he had to jam it back and hope he wouldn’t notice. He had a rubbed blister – the skin clean off on his right hand; every now and then he licked the salty dirt off it.

He’d suggested doing the mowing but it was no go after that time when the thing packed up on him – wasn’t his fault, it needed servicing, but he got the blame. Sometimes this job was worse than school, and he’d thought that the minute he left school, his troubles would be over. Once a month he went home and Mum made a fuss of him, but his sisters had gone into service, and his brothers were much older, and Dad kept telling him how lucky he was to learn his trade under Mr McAlpine. After a few hours he didn’t know what to do with himself and he missed his friends who were all working in different places. He had been used to doing things in a crowd: at school there’d been a gang of them who’d gone fishing, or picked hops in the season for cash. Here there wasn’t anyone to do things with. There was Dottie, but she was a girl so he never knew where he was with her and she treated him like a boy when he was doing a man’s job – sort of – earning his living, anyway, same as her. Sometimes he wondered about going to sea, or he might drive a bus; the bus would be better because ladies took buses; he wouldn’t drive, he’d be a conductor, so’s he could see all their legs …

‘Working very hard, I see, Billy.’

‘Yes, m’m.’ He sucked his blister and at once she saw it.

‘That looks horrid. Come and see me when you’ve had your dinner, and I’ll put a plaster on it.’ Then, seeing that he looked anxious as well as embarrassed, she added, ‘Eileen will tell you where to find me,’ and walked on. She was all right, although she did have very thin, knobbly legs, but then she was as old as Mum, a nice class of lady.

William Cazalet spent his morning in the ways that he most enjoyed. He sat with the newspaper in his study, which was dark and crammed with heavy furniture (he made no concession to it having been the second parlour of the old cottage) worrying pleasurably about the country going to the dogs: that feller Chamberlain didn’t seem to him to be much better than the other feller Baldwin; the Germans seemed to be the only people who knew how to organise things; it was a pity that George VI didn’t have a son, and it looked as though he’d left it a bit late now; if they did have a state in Palestine he doubted whether enough Jews would go there to make a difference to the business – Jews were his chief competitors in the timber trade, and damnably good at it, but none had the hardwood stock that Cazalet’s carried – neither the quality nor the variety. His huge desk was covered with veneer samples: with koko, Andeman padouk, pyinkado, ebony, walnut, maple, laurel and rosewood samples; these were not used for selling, he just liked to have them about. Often he had boxes made from the first cuttings of veneer from some particularly favoured log that had been maturing for years. The study contained a dozen or so, and there were more in London. The room was otherwise furnished with a brilliant red and blue Turkey rug, a glass-fronted bookcase that scraped the low ceiling, several glass cases with huge stuffed fish in them – he enormously enjoyed telling the stories about how he had caught them and regularly imported new guests for the purpose – and, making the room a little less gloomy, large pots of scarlet geraniums on the window-sill in full unwinking flower. The walls were hung three deep with prints: hunting prints, prints of India, and prints of battles – all smoke and scarlet jackets and the whites of rearing horses’ eyes. Newspapers that he had read were stacked upon chairs. Heavy decanters half full of whisky and port stood on an inlaid table with the appropriate glasses. A sandalwood statue of a Hindu god – a present from a rajah when he was in India – stood on top of a cabinet full of shallow drawers in which he kept his collection of beetles. His desk was chiefly covered with the plans for his new conversion of part of the stables: there were to be two garages below, and quarters for Tonbridge and his family – wife and small boy – above. Building was well under way, but he kept thinking of improvements and to that end had sent for the builder, Sampson, to meet him at the site. One of the four clocks struck the half hour. He got to his feet, collected his tweed cap from a hook on the back of the door, and walked slowly down to the stables. As he walked, he reflected that that nice feller he’d met in the train … what was his name? Began with a C, he thought – anyway he’d find out when they came to dinner; naturally he’d asked Mrs Whatshername as well. The only thing was he couldn’t remember whether he had told Kitty they were coming; in fact, if he couldn’t remember, it probably meant that he hadn’t. He must get up some port; the Taylor ’23 would be just the ticket.

The stables were built on two sides at right angles. To the left were the stalls where he kept his horses; to the right were the old loose boxes that were half converted. Wren was grooming his chestnut mare, Marigold; he could hear the steady soothing hiss before he got to the door. There was no sign of Sampson. The other horses shifted in their straw at his approach. William loved his horses, riding every morning of his life, and keeping one, a large grey of sixteen hands called Whistler, at livery in London. Whistler was in a stall now, and William frowned.

‘Wren! I told you to turn him out. It’s his holiday.’

‘I’ve to catch that pony first. Never catch ’im once I’ve let t’other out.’

Fred Wren was a small man, wiry and hard. He looked as though all of him had been compressed; he’d been a stable lad turned jockey, but a bad fall had left him lame. He’d been with William for nearly twenty years. Once a week he got drunk so it was a mystery how he hauled himself up the ladder into the hayloft where he slept. This behaviour was known but tolerated because in every other way he was an excellent groom.

‘Mrs Edward coming down, is she?’

‘Today. They’re all coming.’

‘So I heard. Mrs Edward’ll go nicely on the liver chestnut. Lovely seat on a horse, she has. You don’t see many like ’er.’

‘Quite right, Wren.’ He gave Marigold a pat, and turned to go.

‘One thing, sir. Could you tell those workmen to wash away their cement? They’re blocking my drains.’

‘I’ll tell them.’

And you tell them to take their ladders down of an evening, and not leave my yard looking like a pigsty. Wood shavings, buckets and making free with my water – I’ve had enough of them and no mistake, the cheeky monkeys. Wren stood looking at the back of his employer as he thought this. But there was no stopping that old man: he’d have the stables down next, he shouldn’t wonder. But the mere thought of that made him feel queer. When he’d first come to this place there had been no talk of motor cars and such. Now there were two of them, nasty smelly things. If Mr Cazalet took it into his head to collect any more of them, where would he put the contraptions? Not in my stables, he thought rather shakily. He was much older than he thought anybody knew and he didn’t like modern times.

Wren fussing about the drains made William think. The new premises would need their own water. Perhaps he’d better sink another well. Then the garden and stables could share their water supply – instead of the garden using water from the house – and – yes! He’d do a spot of divining after lunch. He’d speak to Sampson about it, but Sampson didn’t really know the first thing about wells – he couldn’t find water to save his life. Cheered by the thought of yet another enterprise, he stumped over to the garages.

Tonbridge held the car door open for Madam, and the Duchy climbed gratefully into the back of the old Daimler. It was cool after the heat of the high street and smelled faintly of prayer books. The boot was full of the large grocery order; her new trug and secateurs from Till’s lay on the seat beside her, a case of Malvern water on the seat in front.

‘We just have to collect my order from the butcher’s, Tonbridge.’

‘Very good, m’m.’

She eased a hat pin that seemed to be working its way through her hat into her head. It would be too hot now to pick the roses; she would have to wait until evening. She would have a short rest after luncheon, and then go out into the garden. In weather like this she begrudged every minute she could not spend there.

The butcher came out with her lamb in a parcel. He had been most apologetic about the last order having been unsatisfactory. He raised his boater to her as the car moved on.

Tonbridge got the sweets wrong. ‘I want mixed fruits – not just gooseberries. I’m afraid you must take them back.’

Tonbridge went slowly back into the shop. He didn’t like having to buy sweets, and he hated taking them back because the woman who kept the shop was sharp with him and reminded him of Ethyl. But he did it, of course. It was all part of the job.

He drove the Duchy home at a lugubrious twenty miles an hour – the pace he usually reserved for Mrs Edward or Mrs Hugh when they were pregnant. The Duchy did not notice this; driving was for men, and they might go at what pace they pleased. The only driving she had ever done was in a pony cart when she was a great deal younger. But she sensed that the sweet business had upset him, so when they got home and he was helping her out of the car, she said, ‘I expect you will be most relieved when the garages are finished, and you have a nice flat for your family.’

He looked at her – his mournful brown eyes with the bloodshot lower lids did not change – and said, ‘Yes, m’m. I expect I shall be,’ and shut the car door after her. As he drove the car round to the back door to unload it, he reflected gloomily that his only chance of getting away from Ethyl was shortly to be lost. She’d be down here, nagging him, complaining about how quiet it was, with that kid of hers whining all the time, and his life would be just as bad as it was when the family were in town. There must be a way out of it somehow, but he couldn’t see what it was.

Eileen had been behind herself all morning. It had started all right: she’d got her housework – the reception rooms – done before breakfast. But when she was washing the breakfast things, she discovered that all the china for the nursery meals hadn’t been touched since Christmas: the whole lot needed washing, and of course Mrs Cripps hadn’t been able to spare Dottie, and Peggy and Bertha had all the rooms upstairs to get ready. Eileen didn’t like to say anything, but she did think that Mrs Cripps might have spoken to the girls about it and got it done earlier. It wasn’t all done now, but there was an early dining room lunch, which meant that the kitchen wouldn’t get theirs until nearly two. She was in the pantry, rolling water-beaded butter balls and setting them in glass dishes for lunch and dinner that evening.

The door was open and she could hear Mrs Cripps shouting at Dottie, who scuttled back and forth down the passage with the kitchen washing-up. Smells of new cake and flapjacks wafted from the kitchen, reminding her that she was starving: she never could fancy much breakfast and there’d only been a rock cake with middle mornings. In London, Mrs Norfolk provided a real sit-down meal for elevenses – tinned salmon or a nice piece of Cheddar – but, then, she wasn’t having to cook for the numbers expected of Mrs Cripps. Eileen always came to the country with the family for Christmas and the summer holidays. At Easter she had her fortnight’s holiday and Lillian, the housemaid at Chester Terrace, came down instead of her. Eileen had been with the family seven years; she was fond of them, but she adored Miss Rachel – one of the sweetest ladies she’d ever met. She couldn’t think why Miss Rachel had never got married, but supposed she’d had a Disappointment in the war, like so many. But the summer was going to be hard work all the way, and that was a fact. Still, she liked to see the children enjoying themselves and Mrs Hugh would soon be having another and there’d be a baby again at Christmas. That was the butter done. She took the small tray of dishes to put in the larder and nearly ran into Dottie – that girl never looked where she was going. Poor girl, she had a summer cold and a very nasty cold sore on her lip in spite of all the vanishing cream that Eileen had kindly lent her. She was carrying a huge great tray piled with the kitchen china for laying up in the hall.

‘You shouldn’t put so much on a tray, Dottie. You might have a nasty accident.’

But it didn’t matter how kindly you spoke to her, she still looked scared. Eileen guessed that she was homesick because she remembered how she’d felt when she first went into service: cried her eyes out every night, and spent all the afternoons writing letters home, but Mum had never answered them. She didn’t like to think of those days. Still, we all have to go through them, she thought. It’s all for the best in the end. She went to the kitchen to look at the time. Half past twelve – and she must get a move on.

Mrs Cripps was in a frenzy – stirring things, popping things in and out of ovens. The kitchen table was half covered with basins, saucepans, pastry-making apparatus and the mincer and empty jugs, all waiting to be washed up.

‘Where is that girl? Dottie! Dottie!’ There were huge dark patches under her arms, and her ankles bulged over the straps of her black shoes. She lifted a wooden spoon from a double saucepan, placed her forefinger flat upon it, tasted and seized the salt. ‘See if you can find her, would you, Eileen, for me? There’s all this to be cleared up, and the stove wants a good riddle – I don’t know what they put in the coke nowadays, I really don’t. Tell her to hurry, if she knows what the word means.’

Dottie was moonily laying a fork and then a knife, and then a spoon round the table. She paused between each of these gestures, snuffling and staring into space.

‘Mrs Cripps wants you. I’ll finish the table.’ Dottie gave her a hunted look, wiped her nose on her sleeve and scuttled away.

Eileen could hear the girls laughing and talking with Mr Tonbridge, who was bringing in the shopping from Battle. They could lay the table and she would help Mr Tonbridge. She knew where things had to go, which was more than you could say for either Peggy or Bertha. But she had hardly got the butter and cream and the meat stowed in the larder and the Malvern water into her pantry before the word was passed that Mrs Cripps was dishing up. So she sped back through the kitchen, across the hall to the dining room to light the spirit lamps under the warmer on the sideboard, back to the hall where she rang the gong for luncheon, and back to the kitchen where dishes and plates were already piled upon the large wooden tray. She just had time to get across the hall with this and set plates and dishes in position when the family came in for lunch.

Four hours later nearly all of them had arrived: the grownups were having tea in the garden, and the children in the hall with Nanny and Ellen. They had arrived in three cars: Edward unloaded the suitcases and Louise carried hers – it was extremely heavy – into the hall. Aunt Rach had come with them to tell them which rooms. She tried to help Louise with her case, but Louise wouldn’t let her: everybody knew Aunt Rach had a bad back – whatever that might mean. She was delighted to be in the Pink Room and bagged the bed by the window as she was first. She saw the camp bed and realised that Clary would be sleeping with her and Polly. This was a bore, because Clary, although she was twelve (like Polly), seemed much younger, and anyway, she was not much fun, and they had to be nice to her because her mother was dead. Never mind, it was heavenly to be here. She unpacked her case enough to get out her jodhpurs so that she could ride immediately after tea. She’d better unpack altogether or they would find her when she was in the middle of something and make her stop and go and do it. She hung up her three cotton frocks that Mummy had made her bring, and bundled everything else into a drawer, except her books, which she arranged carefully on the table by her bed. Great Expectations, because Miss Milliment had set it for their holiday book, Sense and Sensibility, because she hadn’t read it for at least a year, a funny old book called The Wide, Wide World, because Miss Milliment had said that she used to have bets with a friend when she was a girl that whatever page they opened it at the heroine would be crying, and, of course, her Shakespeare. She heard a car arriving and prayed it would be Polly. She needed someone to talk to: Teddy was aloof – he didn’t answer any questions about his school properly and he wouldn’t even play car numbers with her on the way down. Let it be Polly. Please, God, let it be Polly!

Polly was thankful to arrive. She always felt car-sick, although she never actually was. They stopped for her twice, once on the hill outside Sevenoaks and once the other side of Lamberhurst. Each time she had stumbled out and stood retching, but nothing happened. She had quarrelled with Simon on the way down as well. It was about Pompey. Simon said that cats didn’t notice if people went away – which was an arrant lie. Pompey had watched her packing and tried to get into the case. He simply concealed his feelings in front of other people. He’d even tried to make her feel better about it, by going away and sitting in the kitchen – the furthest possible amount away from her that he could manage. Mummy had kept saying wasn’t she excited about going to Home Place, and she was, but everybody knew you could feel two things at once – probably more than that. She didn’t trust Inge to be kind to him although she’d given her a pot of Wonder Cream as a sort of bribe, but Daddy said that he would be back on Monday and she knew he was trustworthy. But then she’d miss Daddy. Life was nothing but swings and roundabouts. What with crying in London and feeling sick in the car, she had a headache. Never mind. As soon as they’d had tea, she and Louise would go off together to their best tree – an old apple that could be made into a kind of house with the branches being different rooms. It was her and Louise’s tree; horrible Simon wouldn’t be allowed up it. He had been told to carry her case up to her room, but as soon as they were out of sight of the grown-ups, he dropped it and said, ‘Carry your own case.’ ‘Cad!’ She picked it up and began on the stairs. ‘Swine!’ she added. They were the newest worst words she could think of: what Dad had said about a bus driver, and a man in a sports car on the way down. Oh dear! What with Pompey and Simon, things weren’t too good. But there was darling Louise at the top of the stairs, down in a flash to help her with the case. But she was wearing her riding clothes which meant no tree after tea, so it was swings and roundabouts again.

Zoë and Rupert had an awful journey; Zoë had suggested that Clary should go by train with Ellen and Neville, but Clary had made such a fuss that Rupert had given in, and said she’d better come with them. Their car, a small Morris, was not large enough for the whole family, and as it was, Clary had luggage crammed round her in the back. Quite soon she said she felt sick and wanted to be in front. Zoë said that Clary shouldn’t have come in the car if she was going to feel sick and she couldn’t be in front. So Clary was sick – just to show her. They had to stop, and Dad tried to clean it up, but it smelled awful and everybody was cross with her. Then they had a puncture, and Dad had to change the wheel while Zoë sat smoking and not saying a word. Clary got out of the car and apologised to Dad, who was nice and said he supposed she couldn’t help it. They were still in horrible awful old London when this happened. Dad had to unpack the boot to get at his tools and Clary tried to help him, but he said she couldn’t really. He spoke in his patient voice that meant, she felt, he was awfully unhappy only he couldn’t say. He must be – the most terrible thing had happened to him in the world and he had to go on living and pretending it hadn’t and so, of course, she tried to copy his braveness about it because she knew it was so much worse for him. It didn’t matter how much she loved him, it wouldn’t make it up. The rest of the journey, they didn’t talk, so she sang to cheer him up. She sang ‘Early One Morning’, and ‘The Nine Days of Christmas’, and an area it was called, by Mozart – she only knew the first three words and then it had to be la la la, but it was a lovely tune, one of his favourites – and the ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies O’, but when she got to ‘Ten Green Bottles’, Zoë asked her to shut up for a bit – so, of course, she had to. But Dad thanked her for the lovely singing, so it was sucks to Zoë, and that was something. She spent the rest of the journey wanting to go to the lav, but not wanting to ask Dad to stop again.

Lydia and Neville had a lovely time in the train. Neville liked trains more than anything, which was quite reasonable as he was going to be an engine driver. Lydia thought he was a very nice boy. They played noughts and crosses, but that wasn’t much fun because they were too equal for anyone to win. Neville wanted to climb into the luggage rack above the seats – he said a boy he knew always travelled like that – but Nan and Ellen wouldn’t let them. They did let them stand in the corridor, which was very exciting when they went through tunnels and they could see red sparks in the smoky dark and there was a lovely exciting smell. ‘The only thing is,’ Lydia said after thinking about it when they were told to come back into the carriage, ‘that when you are an engine driver, where will you have your house? Because wherever it is, you’ll keep on going to somewhere else, won’t you?’

‘I’ll take a tent with me. I’ll put it up in places like Scotland or Cornwall – or Wales or Iceland. Anywhere,’ he finished grandly.

‘You can’t drive a train to Iceland. Trains don’t go over the sea.’

‘They do. Dad and Zoë go to Paris in a train. They get into it at Victoria Station, and have dinner and go to sleep and when they wake up they’re in France. So they do go across sea. So there.’

Lydia was silent. She didn’t like arguments, so she decided not to have one. ‘I’m sure you’ll be a very good driver.’

‘I’ll take you free whenever you want to go. I’ll go at two hundred miles an hour.’

There he went again. Nothing went at two hundred miles an hour.

‘What are you looking forward to most when we get there?’ She asked politely – she didn’t particularly want to know.

‘My bike. And strawberries. And the Walls’ Ice Man.’

‘Strawberries are over, Neville. It will be raspberries now.’

‘I don’t mind which they are. I can eat any old berry. I very-very-very-like ber-rys-ber-rys-ber-rys.’ He began laughing, his face became bright pink and he nearly fell off his seat. This made Ellen say that he was getting silly; he was quenched by being told to put out his tongue and having the lower half of his face rubbed with a handkerchief and his spit. Lydia watched with distaste, but just as she was feeling rather superior Nan did exactly the same to her.

‘Nasty smuts you got out in the corridor, I told you!’ But it must mean they were nearly there and she was longing for that.

The Cazalets were a kissing family. As the first lot (Edward and Villy) arrived, they kissed the Duchy and Rachel (the children kissed the Duchy and hugged Aunt Rach); when the second lot (Sybil and Hugh) arrived they did the same, and then the brothers and sisters-in-law kissed each other, ‘How are you, darling?’; when Rupert and Zoë arrived he kissed everyone, and Zoë imprinted her brothers-in-law’s faces with her light, scarlet lipstick and lent a creamy cheek to her sisters-in-law’s mouths. The Duchy sat in an upright deck-chair on the front lawn under the monkey puzzle boiling the silver kettle for strong Indian tea. As each one kissed her she made her silent, lightning review of their health: Villy looked rather thin, Edward looked in the pink as he always seemed to; Louise was growing too fast, Teddy was reaching the awkward age; Sybil looked done up, and Hugh looked as though he was recovering from one of his heads; Polly was becoming a pretty child so nothing must ever be said about her appearance; Simon looked far too pale – some sea air would do him good; Rupert looked positively haggard and needed feeding up; and Zoë – but here her thoughts failed her. Incurably honest, she admitted to herself that she did not – like – Zoë and could not get past her appearance which, she felt, was a trifle showy, a little like an actress. The Duchy did not have anything against actresses in general, it was simply that one did not expect to have one in the family. None of the observations were apparent to anyone except Rachel, who quickly admired Zoë’s tussore suit with white crocheted jumper and long string of corals. Clary had not come to kiss, and had rushed straight into the house.

‘She was sick in the car,’ Zoë explained in neutral tones.

‘She’s perfectly all right now,’ Rupert said sharply.

Rachel got to her feet. ‘I’ll go and see.’

‘Do, darling. I don’t think she should have raspberries and cream, it would be too rich for her.’

Rachel pretended not to hear her mother. She found Clary coming out of the downstairs lavatory.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Zoë said you were sick in the car coming down. I thought perhaps you—’

‘That was ages ago. Which room am I in?’

‘The Pink. With Polly and Louise.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Her suitcase stood in the passage outside the lavatory. She picked it up. ‘Is there time to unpack before tea?’

‘I expect so. Anyway, you needn’t have tea if you don’t feel like it.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Aunt Rachel – honestly. I’m perfectly all right.’

‘Good. I just wanted to be sure. Sometimes people feel awful after they’ve been sick.’

She took a hesitating step towards Rachel, put down the case, and then gave her a fierce and hurried hug. ‘I’m tough as old Wellingtons.’ A look of doubt crossed her face. ‘Dad says.’ She picked up the case again. ‘Thank you for worrying about me,’ she finished formally.

Rachel watched her stump upstairs. She felt sad. Her back ached, and that reminded her to take out a cushion for Sybil.

When she returned to the tea party, Zoë was telling Villy about seeing the men’s singles at Wimbledon, Sybil was telling the Duchy about the nanny she had found, Hugh and Edward were talking shop, and Rupert was a little apart, sitting on the lawn, hands round his knees, watching the scene. Everybody was smoking except for Sybil. The Duchy interrupted Sybil to say, ‘Pour away your tea, darling, it will be cold. I’ll give you another cup.’

Rachel proffered the cushion, and Sybil heaved herself up gratefully for it to be put in place.

Zoë, who observed this, gave Sybil a covert second glance and wondered how anybody could go about looking so monstrous. She could at least wear a smock, or something, instead of that awful green dress strained over her stomach. God! She hoped she’d never be pregnant.

Rachel took an Abdullah from the box on the tea table and looked about for a light. Villy waved her little sha-green lighter at her, and Rachel went over for it.

‘The court is all ready for tennis,’ she said, but before anybody could answer, they heard the car arrive. Doors slammed, and, seconds later, Lydia and Neville ran through the white gate. ‘We went over sixty miles an hour.’

‘Gracious!’ exclaimed the Duchy kissing him. Overexcited she thought. It will end in tears.

‘I betted Tonbridge he couldn’t go fast, so he went!’

‘He went how he would’ve went anyway,’ Lydia said primly, bending down to her grandmother. ‘Neville is rather young for his age,’ she whispered very loudly indeed.

Neville turned on her. ‘I’m not as young for my age as you are! How can you be young for your age? You couldn’t be your age if you were young for it!’

‘That’ll do, Neville,’ Rupert said with his hand over the lower part of his face. ‘Kiss your aunts and go and get ready for tea.’

‘I’ll kiss the nearest.’ He planted a smacking kiss on Sybil’s cheek.

‘And the others,’ ordered Rupert.

He sighed theatrically but did as he was told. Lydia, who had done her kissing, ended with Villy onto whom she flung herself.

‘Tonbridge has a very red neck. It goes dark red if you talk about him in the car,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t talk about him. You should talk to him, or not at all.’

‘Oh, I didn’t. It was Neville. I simply noticed.’

‘We don’t want any tales,’ said the Duchy. ‘Run along how to Ellen and Nanny.’ They looked at her, but went at once.

‘Oh dear, aren’t they priceless? They do make me laugh.’ Rachel stubbed out her cigarette.

‘Now – what about your tennis?’ She wondered whether Villy minded her mother-in-law reprimanding Lydia, and she knew Villy loved to play.

‘I’m game,’ said Edward at once.

‘Hugh, do play. I’ll come and watch you.’ Sybil longed to have a little rest in the cool of their bedroom, but she didn’t want Hugh to be robbed of his tennis.

‘I’m happy to play if I’m wanted,’ but he didn’t want to. He wanted to lie in a deck-chair and read – have a peaceful time.

For once, however, they were cheated of sacrificing themselves to each other’s imagined requirements, as Zoë, leaping to her feet, proclaimed her interest in playing and said she’d pop up and change. Rupert immediately said, right, he’d play too, and there was the double. The Duchy was going to deadhead and pick her roses, and Rachel had just decided that as everybody seemed happy and occupied she could go to her room and read Sid’s letter, when her father emerged from the house.

‘Hallo, hallo, everybody. Kitty, it’s quite all right, because I’ve remembered now that the Whatsisnames couldn’t dine with us, so they are just coming for a drink.’

‘Who, dear?’

‘Chap I met in the train. Can’t for the life of me remember his name, but he was a very nice chap and, of course, I asked his wife as well. Pity I got up the port, but I expect we’ll manage to drink it.’

‘What time did you ask them, because dinner is at eight?’

‘Oh, I didn’t fuss about the time. They’ll come about six, I should think. Ewhurst they’re coming from – that’s where the chap said he lived. Rachel, can you spare a minute? I want to read you the end of the British Honduras chapter before I start to compare their mahogany with the West African variety.’

‘You read that bit to me, darling.’

‘Did I? Well, never mind, I’ll read it again,’ and taking her by the arm he marched her firmly into the house.

‘Why do you let him go in trains?’ Hugh said to his mother as she went in search of her secateurs and trug. ‘If he drove with Tonbridge, he wouldn’t meet nearly so many people.’

‘If he goes with Tonbridge, he insists on driving. And as nothing will stop him driving on the right-hand side of the road, Tonbridge is refusing to be driven by him. If he goes by train, then neither of them has to give way.’

‘Don’t the police have something to say about the right-hand side of the road?’

‘They do, of course. But the last time he was stopped, he got very slowly out of the car, and explained that he’d always ridden that side of the road and he wasn’t going to stop now just because he was motoring, and they ended up apologising to him. He’ll have to stop soon: his eyesight is really quite bad. You have a word with him, dear, I expect he’ll listen to you.’

‘I doubt it.’

They parted, and Hugh went upstairs to be sure that Sybil was all right. He went up the cottage stairs, avoiding the children who were all having tea in the hall.

Tea was nearly over, and the older children were panting to be allowed to get down. They had all had the statutory piece of plain bread and butter, followed by as many pieces of bread and jam as they pleased (the Duchy did not approve of butter and jam – ‘a bit rich’, her uttermost condemnation) and then there were flapjacks and cake, and then there were raspberries and cream – all washed down by mugs of creamy milk that Mr York had delivered from the farm that morning. Ellen and Nanny presided, careful of each other’s status, and more watchful and firm with their own charges than they were at home. Polly and Simon, unaccompanied, were no-man’s land, which curiously subdued them. Manners seemed to make most people dull, Louise thought. She kicked Polly under the table, who, taking the cue, asked, ‘Please, may we get down?’

‘When everyone has finished,’ Nanny said.

Neville hadn’t. They all looked at him. When he realised this he started shovelling in his raspberries very fast, until his cheeks bulged.

‘Stop that!’ said Ellen sharply, whereupon he choked, opened his mouth and a messy slide of raspberries dropped onto the table.

‘You others may get down.’ This they thankfully did, just as the scene was starting.

‘Where are you going?’ Clary called to Polly and Louise. She knew they were trying to leave her out.

‘To see Joey,’ they called, running to the north door. They did not want her, she thought. She decided to go for an explore by herself. At first, she did not notice where she was going, was too engaged in hating everyone; Louise and Polly always ganged up – like the girls at school. If she had gone with them to see Joey they wouldn’t have let her ride him, or they would just have let her have one small turn on him at the end. Anyway, she was wearing her shorts and the stirrup leathers would have pinched her knees awfully. She could hear Neville’s wails coming from an upstairs open window: serve him right, the silly fool. She kicked a stone with her foot and it hurt her toe—

‘Look out!’ It was horrible Teddy and Simon on their bicycles. What was horrible about them was that they simply wouldn’t talk to her at all. They only talked to each other and grown-ups – but usually they got a bit nicer when the holidays had been going for a bit. She was at the corner of the house now, where to the left she could see the tennis court and hear them calling, ‘Love fifteen,’ and, ‘Yours, partner!’ She could offer to be a ball-boy, but she didn’t want even to see Zoë, thank you very much. She heard Dad give his hooting laugh when he missed a ball. He didn’t take games very seriously – unlike the others. To the right she could see the large part of the garden and in the distance, the beginnings of the kitchen garden. That’s where she would go. She walked along the cinder path by the greenhouses, whose glass was painted a smeary white. She could see the Duchy in her large hat, snipping and bending over her roses, and decided to go through the greenhouses to avoid being seen. The first one smelled of nectarines that were fan-trained up the wall. Overhead was an enormous vine, the grapes like small, clouded, green glass beads. They wouldn’t be at all ripe, but they looked very pretty, she thought. She felt one or two of the nectarines, and one fell off into her hand. It wasn’t her fault, it simply toppled. She put it in her shorts pocket to eat somewhere secret. There were masses of pots of geraniums and chrysanthemums that were hardly in bud; the gardener showed them at the Flower Show. The last greenhouse was full of tomatoes, the yellow and the red; the smell of them was delicious and so overpowering it tickled her nose. She picked a tiny one to eat; it was as sweet as a sweet. She picked three more and stuffed them in her other pocket. She shut the last greenhouse door and stepped into the cooler, but still golden, air. The sky was pale blue with a drift of little clouds like feathers. By the kitchen-garden gate there was a huge bush with purplish flowers like lilac only pointed; it was littered with butterflies – white ones, orange ones with black and white on them, small blue ones and one lemon with tiny dark veins on it, the most beautiful of all, she thought. She watched them for a bit and wished she knew their names. Sometimes they were restless and went from flower to flower with hardly a pause. I suppose the honey gets used up out of each little flower, she thought. They have to go on until they find a full one.

She decided to come and see them often: in the end they might get to know her, but they seemed a bit unearthly for people – more like ghosts or fairies – they didn’t need people, lucky things.

The kitchen garden, with walls all round it, was very hot and still. There was one long bed of flowers for picking, and the rest was vegetables. Plum and greengage trees were grown against the walls and a huge fig tree, whose leaves were quite rough to touch and smelled of slightly warm mackintosh. It had a lot of figs, and some had fallen to the ground, but they were still green and hard and shiny.

’Come and see what I’ve got!’

She hadn’t noticed Lydia, who was squatting on the ground in the middle of two rows of cabbages.

‘What have you got?’ she said, copying a grown-up voice – not really wanting to know.

‘Caterpillars. I’m collecting them for pets. This is my box for them. I’m going to make holes in the lid with Nan’s smallest knitting needle ’cos they need some air, but they won’t be able to escape. You can have some if you like.’

Lydia was nice. Clary didn’t actually want any caterpillars, she was too old for them, but she felt pleased to be asked.

‘I’ll help you if you like,’ she said.

‘You can tell where they are because of the eaten bits of leaves. Only please pick them up carefully. As they haven’t got any bones you can’t tell what would hurt.’

‘All right.’

‘Do you want the very small ones?’ Clary asked, after finding a whole lot on one leaf.

‘Some, because they’ll last longer. The big ones will go into cocoons and stop being pets.’

‘Except for size they do look the same, though,’ she said after a bit. ‘Their little black faces are just the same: it’s no good giving them names. I’ll just have to call them them.’

‘Like sheep. Only not awfully like sheep.’

This made Lydia laugh and she said, ‘You don’t have caterpillar shepherds. Shepherds know sheep quite well. Mr York told me. He knows his pigs and they all have names.’

When Clary thought they’d got too many, and Lydia said there were enough, they went to see if there were any strawberries left because Lydia said she was thirsty and if she went into the house for some water, Nan would find her and make her have a bath. But the only strawberries they found were all half eaten by things. Clary told Lydia about wanting a cat, and how her dad had said they’d have to think about it.

‘What does your mother say?’

‘She’s not my mother.’

‘Oh!’ Then she said, ‘I know she’s not, really. Sorry.’

Clary said, ‘It’s all right,’ but it wasn’t.

‘Do you like her? Aunt Zoë, I mean?’

‘I don’t have any feelings about her.’

‘But even if you did, it couldn’t be the same, could it? I mean, nobody could be like a real mother. Oh, Clary, I feel awfully sad for you! You’re a tragic person, aren’t you? I think you’re terrifically brave!’

Clary felt extraordinary. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. It was funny; she felt lighter, someone knowing made it less of a hard secret, because Ellen always changed the subject in a brisk horrible way, and Dad never mentioned her – never once even said ‘your mother’, let alone telling her all the things she wanted to know. He couldn’t help it, it was too awful for him to talk about, and she loved him far too much to want to make anything worse for him, and so there was nobody … Lydia was crying. She wasn’t making any noise, but her lip was trembling and tears spurted out onto the strawberry straw.

‘I’d hate my mother to die,’ she said. I’d hate it – too much.’

‘She’s not going to die,’ Clary said. ‘She’s the wellest person I’ve ever seen in my life!’

‘Is she? Really the wellest?’

‘Absolutely. You must believe me, Lyd – I’m far older than you and I know that sort of thing.’ She felt in her pocket for a handkerchief for Lydia, and remembered the tomatoes. ‘Look what I’ve got!’

Lydia ate the three tomatoes, and they cheered her up. Clary felt very old and kind. She offered Lydia the nectarine, and Lydia said, ‘No, you have it,’ and Clary said, ‘No, you’re to have it. You’ve got to.’ She wanted Lydia to have everything. Then they took the caterpillars and went to the potting shed to see if Mr McAlpine still had his ferrets.

Teddy and Simon rode their bicycles round the house and then round the stables, and finally down the road to Watlington and along the drive to the Mill House that their grandfather had bought and was rebuilding to be an extra holiday house for some of them. They did not talk much, both having to contend with the switch from Teddy being a prefect and Simon a junior at their school, to being ordinary holiday cousins who could rag each other. On the way back, Teddy said to Simon, ‘Shall we let them play Monopoly with us?’

And Simon, secretly pleased to have his opinion asked, answered as casually as he could, ‘We’d better, or they’ll make no end of a fuss.’

Sybil had a lovely peaceful time eating Marie biscuits – she kept feeling hungry in between meals – and reading The Citadel by A. J. Cronin, who had been a doctor, like Somerset Maugham.

Usually she read more seriously: she was somebody who read more to be enlightened and educated than for pleasure, but now she felt incapable of mental effort. She had brought T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral with her, which she and Villy had seen at the Mercury, and Auden and Isherwood’s Ascent of F6, but she didn’t feel at all like reading them. It was lovely to be in the country. She really wished that Hugh could stay down for the week with her, but he and Edward had to take turns to be at the office, and Hugh wanted to be free when the baby was born. Or babies: she was practically sure there were two of them judging by the activity inside her. After this, they really must make sure that they didn’t have any more. The trouble was that Hugh hated all forms of contraception; after seventeen years, she wouldn’t actually have minded terribly if they stopped all that sort of thing altogether, but Hugh obviously didn’t feel like that. She wondered idly what Villy did about it, because Edward wouldn’t be a very easy person to say no to, not that one ought to do that, anyway. When Polly was born they had sort of decided that two was enough; they had been much poorer then and Hugh had worried about school fees if they had more sons, so they’d battled on with her Dutch cap, and douches, and Volpargels, and Hugh not coming inside her, until the whole business had seemed so worrying that she had completely stopped enjoying it although, of course, she never let him know that. But last year, early in December, they’d had a divine skiing holiday at St Moritz and after the first day when they were aching from exercise, Hugh had ordered a bottle of champagne for them to drink while they took turns to soak in a hot bath. She’d made him go first, because he’d hurt his ankle, and then he sat and watched her. When she was ready to come out, he’d held an enormous white bath towel out and wrapped it round her, and then held her, and then unpinned her hair and pulled her gently down onto the bathroom mat. She’d started to say something, but he’d put his hand over her mouth and shook his head and kissed her and it had been like it was when they first married. After that, they’d made love every night, and sometimes in the afternoons as well and Hugh did not have a single one of his heads. So her present state was hardly surprising and she was glad, because he was so pleased and always so sweet to her. I’m very lucky, she thought. Rupert’s the funniest, and Edward the most handsome, but I wouldn’t swap Hugh for either of them.

‘I expected you to be fast asleep.’ He came into the room with a glass of sherry in his hand. ‘I’ve brought you this to buck you up.’

‘Oh, thank you, darling. I mustn’t drink too much or I’ll pass out at dinner.’

‘You drink what you want and I’ll finish it.’

‘But you don’t like sherry!’

‘I do sometimes. But I thought if you had this, you could skip the unknowns coming for a drink.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘I read for a bit, and then the Old Man called me in for a chat. He wants to build a squash court behind the stables. Apparently it was Edward’s idea, and he’s started to choose the site.’

‘It will be nice for Simon.’

‘And Polly. All of us, really.’

‘I can’t imagine ever being able to play any game again.’

‘You will, darling. It won’t be built until the Christmas hols. You’ll be as thin as a rake by then. Do you want a bath? Because if you do, you’d better get in quick before the tennis players and the children start.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ll have one in the morning.’

‘You’ll all have one, will you?’ He stroked her belly and got up from the bed. ‘I must get out of these shoes.’ All male Cazalets had long bony feet and were constantly changing their shoes.

Sybil held out the sherry glass. ‘I’ve had enough.’

He drained the glass – like medicine, she thought. ‘By the way, what are we going to call them?’

‘Or him or her, possibly.’

‘Well?’

‘Don’t you think Sebastian’s rather a nice name?’

‘A bit fancy for a boy, isn’t it? I thought it might be nice if we called him William after the Old Man.’

‘If they were twins we could call them both names.’

‘And girls? Or a girl?’

‘I thought perhaps Jessica.’

‘I don’t like that. I like plain names. Jane or Anne. Or Susan.’

‘Of course, there might be one of each. That would be best.’

They had had this conversation before, but before the possibility of twins had occurred. They did not agree about names, although they had agreed about Simon in the end, and Hugh had been allowed to choose Polly when she had wanted Antonia. Now, she said, ‘Anne is a nice name.’

‘I was thinking that Jess wouldn’t be too bad. Where did you put my socks?’

‘Top left-hand drawer.’

A car was heard in the drive.

‘That will be the mystery guests.’

‘I must say I’m jolly glad you don’t keep inviting everyone you meet back for drinks and meals.’

‘I don’t go in enough trains. Do you want me to do anything about getting Polly and Simon towards bed?’

‘It’s their first night, let them rip. They’ll come in when Louise and Teddy are made to.’

‘Okey-doke.’ He ran a comb through his hair, blew her a kiss and went.

Sybil got up from bed and went to the open window; the air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and roses, there were the metallic sounds of blackbirds settling down for the night and the sky was turning apricot streaked with little molten feathery clouds. ‘Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour,’ came into her mind. She leaned further out of the window and pulled a rose towards her to smell it. ‘And since to look at things in bloom, fifty springs are little room,’ – it was unlike Housman to allow anyone fifty springs, let alone three score years and ten. She was thirty-eight, and the thought that it might be a very hard labour and that she might die recurred now. The petals of the rose began to drop; and when she let go of it, it swung back with only the stamens left. She couldn’t die, she was needed. Dr Ledingham was marvellous, and Nurse Lamb a brick. It was just one of those times when the pain and what it was for balanced each other. She had never told Hugh how frightened she had been – the first time – with Polly, nor how much more she had dreaded having Simon, because the notion that one did not remember one’s labour was one of those sentimental old wives’ tales.

Polly and Louise had not ridden Joey in the end. He was still out, Mr Wren had said. He hadn’t had the time to catch him but they could try if they liked, and he’d given them the halter. They could catch him and bring him in for the night, and then they could ride him in the morning. He looked rather cross, so they didn’t argue with him. Louise pinched a handful of oats which she put into her pocket with the sugar lumps Polly had secreted at tea. Nan had seen her, but they had both known that she wouldn’t like to say anything as Polly wasn’t in her charge. They had walked along the damp, shady path in the field, and Polly had got stung by nettles and had held things up by needing dock leaves.

‘Do hurry up,’ Louise had said. ‘Because if we catch him quickly, there will be time for a ride.’

But they hadn’t caught him at all. He was standing in a corner of the field, looking very fat and glossy, eating the rich green grass. He raised his head when they called him and watched them approach. There was a small cloud of flies round his head and his tail swished regularly. Whistler stood head to tail beside him, also grazing. When he saw the girls he started to walk towards them in case they were bringing anything nice.

‘We’ll have to give Whistler some oats, to be fair.’

‘All right – you get the halter ready and I’ll do the feeding.’

But this was the wrong way round, Louise thought. She was sure Polly would muff the halter, and she did. Whistler plunged his soft nose into the handful of oats, spilling a lot of them. Joey saw this and came up for his share. She shut her hand and held it out to Joey who made an expert grab, but the moment Polly tried to put an arm around his neck, he tossed his head and cantered away – an insultingly short distance – where he stood daring them to try again. Whistler nearly knocked Louise over when he nudged her hand for more.

‘Blast! You take the sugar, and I’ll have the halter.’

‘Sorry,’ Polly said meekly. She knew she wasn’t much good at this sort of thing. She was – only a bit – afraid of Joey.

They had another go with the sugar and the same thing happened, only this time Joey laid his ears back and looked quite wicked. When the sugar was gone, Joey wouldn’t come near them, and even Whistler lost interest in the end.

‘I bet Mr Wren knew he wouldn’t let himself be caught,’ Louise said crossly. ‘He might have jolly well done it himself.’

‘Let’s go back and tell him.’

They climbed the gate in silence, and Polly felt Louise was on the verge of being cross. But then she suddenly said, ‘It wasn’t your fault about the halter. Let’s not go and talk to Mr Wren. He’s never nice to us when his face is so red.’

‘Beetroot.’

‘Doesn’t it look awful with his stony blue eyes?’

‘No one would put beetroot and blue together on purpose,’ Polly agreed. ‘What shall we do? Shall we go and see our tree?’

And to her joy, Louise agreed at once. The piece of rope, which they used to get up the first straight hard part, hung just where they had left it at Christmas. They collected bunches of daisies and Louise put them in her pocket for the climb, and when they were comfortably ensconced in the best branch that went up at one end so that they could sit facing each other, leaning their backs against the branch and the trunk respectively, Louise divided the daisies and they both made chains to decorate the branches.

Louise, who bit her nails, had to bite the holes in the stalks for threading, but Polly did hers with her longest nail. They discussed the holidays, and what they most wanted to do in them. Louise wanted the beach, and especially to swim in the St Leonards swimming pool. Polly wanted to have a picnic at Bodiam. Both she and Simon had birthdays in August, so they would be allowed to choose one day. ‘But he’ll choose the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, said Polly sadly. Then she said, ‘Clary has a birthday too, remember?’

‘Oh, God! What will she choose?’

‘We could bend her to our will.’

‘Only by telling her how much we don’t want to do something that we really want.’

‘That’s not bending. That’s …’ she searched for the word, ‘that’s conspiring.’

‘Why does she have to share a room with us? I don’t actually like her much. But Mummy says I ought to because of her not having a mother. I do see that. It must be rotten for her.’

‘She has Aunt Zoë’ Polly said.

‘She doesn’t strike me as a particularly good mother. Awfully glam, but not a mother. Some people aren’t cut out for that sort of thing, you know. I mean look at Lady Macbeth.’

‘I don’t think Aunt Zoë’s terribly like Lady Macbeth. I know you think Shakespeare is wonderful but, honestly, people now aren’t much like his people.’

‘They jolly well are!’

They had a bit of an argument about that, which Louise won by saying nature imitated art and that that wasn’t what she thought, but someone who really knew about that sort of thing. The sun sank, and the orchard, from being a gilded green, turned misty and sage with violet shadows, and it wasn’t hot any more. They began to think about milk and biscuits and their mothers saying goodnight to them.

‘Why don’t you and Rupert have the first bath? I’m quite happy to wait, and I’ve got to go and see that Nan is settling in, anyway. Coming, darling?’

And Edward, who had been winding down the net, joined her. Zoë watched them walk up the steps to the terrace. Edward put his arm round Villy’s shoulders and said something to her that made her laugh. They had won quite easily – would have won all three sets if Edward, the best player, hadn’t had a run of double faults and lost his service. She had to admit that Villy was good, too, not showy, but a steady player with a reliable backhand; she hardly missed a shot. Zoë, who minded losing, felt that it was because Rupert didn’t take the game seriously enough; he was good at volleying, but sometimes, at the net, he had simply left balls for her that she was sure he should have taken, and so, of course, she had often missed them. At least they hadn’t had Sybil playing; she served underarm and simply laughed when she missed things and asked people not to send such fast balls. The worst of playing with her was that everybody pretended she was just as good as everyone else. They were all so nice to one another. They were nice to her as well, but she knew that that was simply because she had become part of the family by marrying Rupert. She did not feel that they really liked her.

‘I’m off for a bath,’ she called to Rupert, who was collecting the tennis balls. ‘I’ll leave the water for you.’ And she ran lightly up the steps before he could reply.

At least the water was hot. She had been wondering how she could decently go ahead and bag the first bath, and then Villy had, confoundingly, simply presented her with it. But it was a ghastly bathroom – freezing cold, and so ugly, with the pitch-pine walls and the window-sill always covered with dead bluebottles. She made the bath so hot she could hardly get into it and lay down for a good soak. These family holidays! You’d think if the Cazalets were so keen on their grandchildren that they’d look after Clarissa and Neville, and let her and Rupert go off and have a proper holiday alone together. But every year – except the first one when they’d been married and Rupert had taken her to Cassis – they had to come here for weeks and weeks and she hardly ever had Rupert to herself, except in bed. Otherwise all the days were spent in doing things with all these kids, everybody worrying about them having a good time, which they would, anyway, with the others to play with. She wasn’t used to all this clannishness; it wasn’t at all her idea of a holiday.

Zoë’s father had died at the battle of the Somme when she was two. She couldn’t remember him at all, although Mummy said that he’d played ride-a-cock-horse with her when she was eighteen months old. Mummy had had to take a job with Elizabeth Arden doing people’s faces all day, so she had been sent to boarding school when she was five – a place called Elmhurst near Camberley. She’d been easily the youngest boarder and everybody had spoiled her. She had quite liked school; it was the holidays that she had hated in the peachy little flat in West Kensington, with her mother out all day and a succession of boring mother’s helps to look after her. Buses and walks in Kensington Gardens, and tea in a tea shop was their idea of a treat. By the time she was ten she was determined to get away from home as soon as possible. As she grew older, she was given the heroine’s parts in the school plays – not because she was any good at acting, but because of her looks. She decided that she would go on the stage as soon as she left school. She certainly wasn’t going to end up like her mother, who had had, apart from her ghastly job, a succession of dreary old men, one of whom she even seemed to want to marry, but not after Zoë told her what he’d tried to do to her when Mother was out one day. There’d been a fearful scene and after that her mother had stopped dyeing her hair, and talked a lot about what a hard life she had.

The only subject upon which she and her mother were in animated agreement was Zoë’s appearance. Zoë evolved from being a pretty baby to an unusually attractive child, and even managed to avoid the common eclipse of adolescence. She never lost her lithe figure, nor had spots or greasy hair, and her mother, who had made herself some authority on appearance, realised early on that her daughter was going to be a beauty, and gradually, all the hopes she had had for her own security and comfort – a nice man who would look after her and obviate the need to work so hard – were transferred to Zoë. Zoë was going to be such a stunner that she could marry anyone she liked, which meant, to Mrs Headford, someone who was so rich that providing for his mother-in-law would be nothing to him. So she taught Zoë to look after herself: to treat her fine thick hair with henna and yolk of egg, to brush her lashes nightly with Vaseline, to bathe her eyes with hot and cold water, to walk across rooms with books on her head, to sleep in cotton gloves with her hands soaked in almond oil – and much else. Although they had no help, Zoë was never expected to do housework, nor to cook; her mother bought a second-hand sewing machine and made her pretty frocks and knitted her jumpers, and when Zoë was sixteen and had passed her School Certificate and said she was sick of school and wanted to go on the stage, Mrs Headford, who was by now a little afraid of her, at once agreed. Dukes had been known to marry people from the theatre, and as she was in no position to bring her daughter out, with a Season and all that, this seemed a viable alternative. She told Zoë that on no account should she marry an actor, made her a simple but exquisitely fitting green dress that matched her eyes for auditions and waited for her daughter’s fame and fortune. But Zoë’s lack of acting ability was masked by her lack of experience, and after two managers had advised her to go to an acting school, Mrs Headford realised that she was back to paying school fees. For two years Zoë attended Elsie Fogerty’s Academy and learned to enunciate, learned mime, learned to walk and some dancing and even a little singing. Nothing availed. She looked so ravishing, and tried so hard, that her teachers went on attempting to turn her into an actress far longer than they might have done had she been plainer. She remained wooden, self-conscious and altogether unable to make any lines that she spoke seem her own. Her only talent seemed to lie in movement; she liked dancing and in the end it was mutually agreed that perhaps she had better concentrate upon that. She left the school and took lessons in tap and modern dance. The only thing to be said for the acting school was that although a number of students had fallen in love with her, Zoë had remained aloof. Disregarding the obvious reason for this, Mrs Headford rashly assumed that Zoë was ‘sensible’ and knew what she was to achieve.

Zoë had kept up with one friend from Elmhurst – a girl called Margaret O’Connor. Margaret lived in London and when she became engaged to a doctor, ‘quite old, but frightfully nice’, she invited Zoë to go dancing with them. ‘Ian will bring a friend,’ she said. The friend was Rupert. ‘He’s had an awful time. Needs cheering up,’ Margaret told her in the Ladies at the Gargoyle Club. Rupert thought Zoë the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life. Zoë fell instantly and madly in love with Rupert. Six months later they were married.

‘… Are you there?’

Zoë got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a towel and unlocked the door.

‘This place is like a Turkish bath!’

‘Better than an igloo. I suppose the dining room will be freezing, as usual?’

The closed look on his face made her regret that remark. He loathed her criticising his parents. He got into the bath and began washing his face vigorously. She bent over and kissed his streaming forehead.

‘Sorry!’

‘What about?’

‘Nothing. I’ll wear my frock with the daisies on it. Shall I?’

‘Fine.’

She left him.

I’ll take her to the flicks in Hastings next week, Rupert thought. She’s never had a proper family life, that’s why she finds it so strange. The thought that having been without it she might now be grateful occurred and went without his pursuing it.

Neville and Lydia sat each end of the bath. He was sulking with Lydia because she’d gone off without him. When she said don’t splash, and he hardly had, he smacked his heels on the water hard and really splashed her. Ellen and Nan had gone to get their suppers, so he would do what he liked. He picked up the sponge and held it threateningly, eyeing her. Then he put it on top of his head, and she laughed admiringly. ‘I can’t do that. I don’t like bath water getting in my eyes.’

‘I like bath water getting everywhere. I drink it.’ He held the sponge up to his mouth and began to suck noisily.

‘It’s all soapy – you’ll be sick.’

‘I shan’t because I’m used to it.’ He drank some more of the stuff to show her. It got less nice and he stopped. ‘I could drink the whole bath if I wanted to.’

‘I suppose you could. I saw a ferret eating a bit of a rabbit with its fur on.’

‘If it was only a bit of a rabbit, it must have been dead.’

‘It might have been a whole rabbit and that was the last bit that it was eating.’

‘I’d wish I’d seen it. Where was it?’

‘In the potting shed. In a cage – it belongs to Mr McAlpine. It had little red eyes. I think it was mad.’

‘How many ferrets have you seen in your life?’

‘Not many. Only a few.’

‘All ferrets eat things, you know.’ He was trying to imagine what a ferret looked like; he’d never seen an animal with red eyes.

‘I’ll come and see it with you tomorrow,’ he offered. ‘I’m used to that kind of thing.’

‘All right.’

‘What will we get for supper? I’m ‘stremely hungry.’

‘You wasted your raspberries,’ Lydia reminded him.

‘Only about the last fourteen. I ate some of them up. Mind your own business,’ he added. ‘Shut up, blast you.’

Villy came into the bathroom before Lydia could say anything back. ‘Hurry up, children. Lots of people want baths.’ She held out a towel and Lydia climbed out and into her arms. ‘What about you, Neville?’

‘Ellen will get me,’ he answered, but Villy got another towel and helped him out.

‘He swore, Mummy! Do you know what he just said?’

‘No, and I don’t want to hear. You must stop telling tales, Lydia – it’s not nice at all.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Lydia agreed. ‘In spite of the awful things he said I won’t tell you what they are. Will you read to me, Mummy? While I’m having my boring old supper?’

‘Not tonight, darling. People are coming for drinks and I haven’t changed. Tomorrow. I’ll come and say goodnight to you, though.’

‘I should jolly well hope you will.’

‘She jolly well hopes you will,’ said Neville, mimicking her. ‘She thinks it’s the least you can do.’ He grinned at Villy, showing the pink gaps where the tips of much larger teeth were just showing.

Edward decided to go and have a whisky and soda with the Old Man while he was waiting for his bath. There was a problem at one of the wharfs that he particularly wanted to discuss without Hugh being there. And this seemed a good chance as he’d seen Hugh being taken around the garden by the Duchy. Accordingly, he put his head round the door of the study and his father, who was sitting at his desk cutting a cigar, welcomed him.

‘Help yourself to a whisky, old boy, and give me one.’

Edward did as he was told, and settled himself in one of the large chairs opposite his father. William pushed the cigar box across to his son and then handed him the cutter. ‘So. What’s on your mind?’

Wondering at the way he always knew, Edward said, ‘Well, actually, sir, Richards is rather on my mind.’

‘He’s on all of our minds. He’s going to have to go, you know.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk about. I don’t think we should be too hasty.’

‘Can’t have a wharf manager who’s practically never there! Never there when you want him, at any rate.’

‘Richards had a rotten war, you know. Got a chest wound he’s never got over.’

‘That’s why we employed him in the first place. Wanted to give him a fair chance. But you can’t run a business by looking after crocks.’

‘I absolutely agree. But after all, Hugh—’ He had been going to say that Hugh’s health wasn’t too good and they wouldn’t dream of sacking him, when the Old Man interrupted.

‘Hugh agrees with me. He thinks that perhaps we needn’t get rid of him altogether but could give him some easier job – less responsibility and all that.’

‘And less pay?’

‘Well, might have to adjust his salary. Depends what we can find for him.’

There was a silence. Edward knew that if the Old Man dug his toes in nothing would move him. He felt momentarily angry with Hugh for discussing this with their father behind his, Edward’s, back, but then he reflected that that was exactly what he was doing himself. He tried again.

‘Richards is a good chap, you know. He’s intensely loyal; he cares about the firm.’

‘I should damn well hope so! I should damn well hope that everybody we employ is loyal – poor look-out if they weren’t.’ Then he relented a bit, and said, ‘We could find him something. Put him on to managing the lorries. I’ve never thought much of Lawson. Or give him a job in the office.’

‘We can’t pay him six hundred a year for a job in the office!’

‘Well – send him out to sell. Put him on commission. Then it’s up to him.’

Edward thought of Richards with his weedy frame and his apologetic brown eyes. ‘That wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘I’d like to think it over.’

William drained his whisky. ‘Married, isn’t he? With children?’

‘Three, and one on the way.’

‘We’ll find something. What you and Hugh should do is concentrate on who is to take his place. It’s vital that we get a good man.’ He looked at Edward with his piercing blue eyes. ‘You should know that by now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are you off?’

‘I’m going to have a bath.’

When he had gone, William thought that he had never tried to say that Richards was any good at his job, so Hugh had been quite right.

Rachel, in her bedroom, could see that the mystery guests had arrived. They came through the white gate from the drive in that uncertain wandering way that people employ when they approach a strange house whose front door is not immediately visible. She put Sid’s letter back into her cardigan pocket; no good to read it now, she would waste it by hurrying. All day, she had been trying to find a quiet, uninterrupted time for it, and been defeated, by her senses of kindness and duty, and by the sheer number of people everywhere. She must now go and help the Duchy find out what on earth the newcomers were called. This difficulty was overcome by her hearing her father emerge from his study, shouting his greeting, ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo. Delighted you’ve come. Clean forgotten your name, I’m afraid, but it happens to all of us sooner or later. Pickthorne! Of course! Kitty! The Pickthornes are here! Now what can I get you to drink, Mrs Pickthorne? A spot of gin? All my daughters-in-law drink gin; filthy drink, but the ladies seem to like it.’

Rachel heard the chink of the drinks trolley being wheeled out of the house, by Hugh, she saw. Perhaps she could just read her letter before she went down? At that moment there was a knock on her door – a timid, rather inexperienced knock.

‘Come in!’

It was Clary; she stood with one hand clutching the other, round which was tied a whitish bandage.

‘What is it, Clary?’

‘Nothing much. Only I think I might have rabies.’

‘What on earth makes you think that, my duck?’

‘I took Lydia to see Mr McAlpine’s ferret in the potting shed. And then Nan came out for her and she went, and then I went back to look at the ferret, and he’d stopped eating the rabbit because it was nearly all finished and he looked so lonely in his cage so I let him out and then he bit me – a bit – not much but he drew blood and you have to take a hot iron or something and burn the place, and I’m not brave enough and I don’t know where the irons are in this house, anyway. That’s what they say in a Louisa Alcott book and Dad’s in the bath and he didn’t hear me, so I thought you could take me to the vet or something—’ She gulped and added, ‘Mr McAlpine will be furious and cross so could you tell him?’

‘Let’s look at your hand.’

Rachel unwrapped what turned out to be one of Clary’s socks from her hot grey little hand. The bite was on her forefinger and did not look deep. While she washed it with water from her ewer, and got iodine and plaster from her medicine chest, Rachel explained that rabies had been stamped out in England so burning was not in order. Clary was brave about the iodine, but something was still worrying her.

‘Aunt Rach! Could you come with me to help get him back into his cage? So that Mr McAlpine won’t know?’

‘I don’t think either of us would be much good at that. Now you must go and see Mr McAlpine and apologise to him. He’ll get it back.’

‘Oh, no, Aunt Rach! He’ll be so awfully angry.’

‘I’ll come with you, but you must do the apologising. And promise never to do anything like that again. It was a very naughty thing to do.’

‘I didn’t mean it to be. And I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, well you must tell him that. Off we go.’

So her letter was postponed again.

The Pickthornes stayed until twenty past eight, by which time some chance remark made by their host finally convinced Mrs Pickthorne that they had not, after all, been asked to dinner. ‘We really must be going,’ she said twice – tentatively, and then with desperation. Her husband, who had heard her the first time, had pretended not to – staving off until the last possible moment the confrontation with her in the car. But it was no use. William got heartily to his feet and, grasping her forearm quite painfully, escorted Mrs Pickthorne to the gate, so that her farewells had to be strewn over her shoulder en route. Mr Pickthorne had to follow: he managed to forget his hat – a Panama – but the child who had been handing round little biscuits fetched it for him as Uncle Edward told her to. ‘You must come again soon,’ William shouted when they were safely in the car. Mr Pickthorne gave a glassy smile, and clashed his gears before rumbling off down the drive. Mrs Pickthorne pretended not to hear.

‘Thought they’d never go!’ William exclaimed as he stumped back through the gate.

‘They thought you’d asked them to dinner,’ Rachel said.

‘Oh, I don’t think so. They can’t have. Did I?’

‘Of course you did,’ said the Duchy calmly. ‘It’s very tiresome of you, William. Most unfair on them.’

‘They’ll go sulking back to a quarrelsome tin of sardines,’ said Rupert. ‘I wouldn’t like to be Mr Pickthorne much. It’ll be all his fault.’

Eileen, who had been hovering for a good half hour, now came out to say that dinner was served.

‘What he said was,’ this was his fourth attempt, ‘“You must come over and dine.” And later, just when we were getting out of the train, he said, “Come about six and have a drink.”’

‘Exactly!’

‘Well, it’s all my fault as usual,’ he said, to break some minutes of uncompanionable silence.

‘Oh, that makes it all right, does it? It’s all your fault so we needn’t say any more?’

‘Mildred, you know I can’t stop you saying anything you like.’

‘I’ve no wish to continue the subject.’

‘There’s nothing to eat at home,’ she said very soon afterwards.

‘We could open a tin of sardines.’

‘Sardines! Sardines!’ she repeated, as though they were tinned mice, as though nobody would think of putting them in a tin unless they were mad. ‘You can have sardines if you’re so keen on them. You know perfectly well what they do to me.’

I know what I’d like to do to you, he thought. I’d like to throttle you quite slowly, and then chuck you down the well. The viciousness of this thought, and the ease and speed with which it occurred, appalled him. I’m as bad as Crippen, he thought. Evil beyond belief. He put a hand on her knee. ‘Sorry I spoilt your evening. It isn’t as though you get a great deal of fun, is it? I don’t mind what I have. Whatever you knock up will be very nice, like it always is.’ He glanced at her and saw he was on the right lines.

‘If only you’d listen to people,’ she said. ‘I expect we’ve got some eggs.’

Dinner seemed to take ages, Zoë thought. They had cold salmon and new potatoes and peas, and there was a rather delicious hock to drink (although William, who considered white wine to be a ladies’ drink, had a bottle of claret) and then chocolate soufflé and finally Stilton and port, but it took a long time because they were all talking so hard that they forgot to take vegetables when they were handed them, and the men had second helpings of salmon, and then, of course, all the vegetables – Rupert got up to hand them round and during all this they were talking about several things at once – the theatre – well, she was interested in that but not French plays and Shakespeare and plays in verse. But then Edward had turned to her and asked her what plays she liked and when she said she hadn’t seen any lately, he told her about a play called French Without Tears, and just as she was thinking that the title sounded pretty boring, he laughed and said, ‘Do you remember, Villy, that wonderful girl, Kay something-or-other, and one of the men said, “She gave me the old green light”, and the other one said he thought she’d be pretty stingy with her yellows and reds?’ And then when Villy had nodded and smiled as though she was humouring him, he’d turned again to Zoë, ‘I think you ought to see that some day, it would make you laugh.’ She liked Edward, and she felt he was attracted to her. Earlier, as they’d been going into the dining room, he’d said what a pretty dress she was wearing. It was a navy voile with large white yellow-centred daisies on it and rather a low V neck, and once she felt sure that Edward was looking down her dress and turned her head to look at him and he had been. He gave her a small smile and winked. She tried to frown but, actually, it was the best moment at dinner and she wondered whether he was falling in love with her. Of course, that would be terrible, but it wouldn’t be her fault. She’d be distant, but very understanding; she’d probably let him kiss her once, because once wouldn’t count; she would be taken by surprise, or he would think she had been. But she’d explain to him how it would all be no good because it would break Rupert’s heart, and, anyway, she loved Rupert. Which was true. They would be having lunch at the Ivy – this would be after the kiss; the lunch would be to explain everything. Now she was married she hardly ever got invited out to lunch, and as an art master Rupert was far too poor for her to take people. He would be pleading with her just to let him see her occasionally – she began to wonder whether perhaps he might not be allowed to do that …

‘Darling! Wasn’t he the man who kept staring at you at the Gargoyle?’

‘Which man?’

‘You know who I mean. The small man with rather bulging eyes. The poet.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t say “What’s your name?” to people who stare at me!’

She felt she had scored, but there was a moment’s silence, and then Sybil said, ‘Dylan Thomas at a nightclub? How interesting!’

Rupert said, ‘That’s it.’

The Duchy said, ‘Poets used to be seen everywhere. It’s only nowadays that they seem to have gone underground. They were quite persona grata in my youth. One met them at luncheon and perfectly ordinary occasions like that.’

‘Darling Duchy, the Gargoyle is four floors up.’

‘Really? I thought all nightclubs were underground, I don’t know why. I’ve never been to one.’

William said, ‘Too late now.’

And she replied serenely, ‘Far too late,’ and rang for Eileen to clear the plates.

Edward further endeared himself to her by saying, ‘Never seen the point of poetry, can’t understand what the fellers are getting at.’

And Villy, who heard him, said, ‘But, darling, you never read anything. No use pretending it’s just poetry you don’t read.’

While Edward was saying good-humouredly that one highbrow member in the family was quite enough, Zoë eyed Villy appraisingly. She didn’t seem right for Edward, somehow. She was sort of – well, you couldn’t say she wasn’t attractive, but she wasn’t glamorous. She had a bony nose that was too big, a bony face but heavy eyebrows that were quite dark, not grey like her hair, and a boyish figure that was, none the less, lacking in allure. Her eyes were brown, and not bad, but her lips were too thin. Altogether, she was a surprising person for handsome Edward to have married. Of course, she was terribly good at things – not just riding and tennis, but she played the piano, and some sort of pipe instrument, and read French books, and made real lace on a pillow and bound books in floppy soft leather, and wove table-mats and then embroidered them. There seemed to be nothing that she couldn’t do, and no particular reason why she should do any of it – Edward was far richer than Rupert. And she was also what Zoë’s mother (and consequently Zoë) called well connected, although Zoë now never actually said that sort of thing aloud. Villy’s father had been a baronet; Villy had a picture of him in a silver frame in their drawing room; he looked fearfully old-fashioned, with a drooping white walrus moustache, a wing collar with a tight tie, and large melancholy eyes. He’d been a composer – and quite well known, something she wished Rupert would become; there was a lot of money in portrait painting if you got to paint the right people. Lady Rydal, though, was a real battleaxe. Zoë had only met her once, here, soon after she was married. The Duchy had asked her to stay because they’d all been very fond of Sir Hubert and were sorry for her when he died. She’d made it clear that she disapproved of painted nails, and the girls wearing shorts and the cinema and women drinking spirits – a real kill-joy.

‘… What do you think, silent Zoë?’

‘Rupert says I’m no good at thinking about anything,’ she replied. She hadn’t been listening and hadn’t the faintest idea of what they had been talking about – not the faintest.

‘I never said that, darling. I said you operated on your intuition.’

The Duchy said, ‘Women are perfectly capable of thought. They simply have different things to think about.’

Edward said, ‘I really don’t see why Zoë should think about Mussolini.’

‘Of course not! The less she thinks about that sort of thing the better! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that wop dictator,’ the Brig added kindly to his daughter-in-law. ‘Although I have to say that he’s made a good job of planting eucalyptus and draining all those swamps. I have to give him that.’

‘Brig, darling! You talk as though he planted them himself.’ Rachel’s face crumpled with amusement. ‘Imagine him! Every button doing overtime on his uniform when he bent down—’

Sybil, who up until then had been listening affectionately to the Brig’s extremely long story about the second time he went to Burma, said, ‘But he’s also built some pretty good roads, hasn’t he? Had them built, I mean?’

‘Of course he has,’ said Edward. ‘Generated employment, got people to work. And, my God, I bet they work harder than they do here! I sometimes think that this country could do with a dictator. Look at Germany! Look at Hitler! Look what he’s done for his people!’

Hugh was shocked. ‘We don’t want a dictator, Ed! You can’t think that!’

‘Of course we don’t! What we need is a decent socialist government. Someone who understands the working classes. They’d work if they had a decent incentive.’ Rupert looked defiantly round the room at his Tory family. ‘This lot think of nothing but preserving the status quo.’

The chocolate soufflé arrived and deflected them from this well-worn jungle path, although Zoë could hear Edward mutter that there was nothing much wrong with the status quo that he could see.

After the soufflé, Sybil and Villy said they were going to bottle the children up for the night, and Zoë, who did not want them to see how little Clary liked her, sat tight. Rachel, who had observed this, said she was going to fetch her cigarettes. The Duchy suggested that they leave the men to their cheese and port.

Louise and Polly had had their bath together and left the water for Clary as they had been told to do, but she didn’t seem to be about, and they didn’t see why they should find her. They brushed their hair and plaited Louise’s, which was difficult because it wasn’t long enough yet for a good plait. She had decided to grow it, so that when she was an actress she wouldn’t have to wear wigs. ‘Although if you act someone very old, you’ll have to have a white one,’ Polly said, but Louise said the only old person she wanted to play, and it was play not act, was Lear and they weren’t yet fair about letting women play the decent Shakespeare parts.

‘I’ll probably have to start with Hamlet,’ she said.

‘I can’t see why you couldn’t just be Rosalind – or Viola. They both wear men’s clothes.’

‘But underneath they’re women. That’s the point. I’ll put the elastic band on – other people always tweak.’

‘You know, Polly, you really ought to think what you’re going to do – you’re getting a bit old not to know.’

‘I know I am. I think I’d quite like to marry someone,’ she said some minutes later.

‘That’s feeble! All kinds of people get married! That’s neither here nor there!’

‘I knew you’d say that.’ Any minute now Louise would start making awful suggestions. She’d done it so often that Polly thought she must have run out of ideas by now, but she never had.

‘A fishmonger? You could wear a long apron and a nice little straw hat.’

‘I’d hate it. It’s so surprising and awful when blood comes out of fish.’

‘You’d be good at arranging them on the slab.’

‘If only they weren’t fish, I would.’

‘It’s not good being squeamish, Polly. There’s hardly anything you can be if you’re that. I shall have to stab people, and strangle them, and faint down flights of stairs.’

‘If you’re going to be like that, I shall read.’

‘All right, I won’t. Let’s go and find Teddy and Simon and play Monopoly.’

But in the schoolroom they found Teddy and Simon in the middle of a game which looked like going on for ages.

‘We’ll play the next one with you,’ one of them said, but it was an idle promise because the chances were that they’d be made to go to bed long before it finished.

‘You can stay here if you shut up,’ the other one said, so, of course, they took their supper trays and went back to their room. Louise tried to slam the door and spilt a lot of her milk.

‘If only Pompey was here! He loves spilt milk, much more than in a saucer.’ They got a face towel and mopped it up, and Polly kindly offered to go and ask for some more.

‘Please ask for it in a mug. I simply loathe milk in a glass – it makes the milk seem all watery.’

After supper they got into their beds and Polly did her knitting that she’d been making since the Christmas holidays, a thick, very pale pink jumper, and Louise started The Wide, Wide World and was soon snuffling and wiping her eyes on the sheet. ‘Everything to do with God seems very sad,’ she said. Polly stopped her knitting – at least she’d done nearly an inch – and read The Brown Fairy Book because it was not much fun not reading when the other person was. She put on a light and moths came in, little flittery ones and fat ones that thudded against the lampshade.

When Villy and Sybil came, they at once asked where Clary was.

Polly said, ‘Don’t know.’

Louise said, ‘We’d clean forgotten her,’ but they both knew there would be trouble. After some questioning they went in search of her. Then Aunt Rachel came in and asked the same thing.

‘We don’t know, Aunt Rach, honestly. She didn’t come to the schoolroom for supper. We left the bath for her.’ Louise tried to make that sound kind, but it didn’t because it wasn’t. Aunt Rachel went out of the room at once, and they could hear her talking to their mothers. They looked at each other.

‘It’s not our fault.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Polly. ‘We didn’t want her to come with us after tea.’

‘Blast! The trouble is she makes me feel so awful and that makes me not like her. Much.’

After a pause, Polly said, ‘She doesn’t make you feel awful – it’s how we are to her that does. We’ll have to—’ but then Aunt Villy came in and she shut up.

‘Now listen, you two. You must not gang up on Clary. How would you like it if she and the other one of you did it to either of you?’

‘We honestly didn’t gang up,’ Louise began, but Polly said, ‘We promise we won’t any more.’

But Aunt Villy took no notice of this and said, ‘I blame you, Louise, most, because you are the oldest.’ She was turning down Clary’s bed, and then opening her rather battered suitcase. ‘You could at least have helped her unpack.’

‘Polly is the same age as Clary, and I don’t help her unpack.’

Aunt Sybil came in now, and said, ‘She’s nowhere to be found. Rachel is asking in the kitchen, but I think we ought to get Rupert.’

‘Shall we go and look for her, Aunt Syb?’

But her mother said at once, ‘You will do no such thing. You will unpack her suitcase really nicely, and one of you may fetch her supper from the schoolroom. I am very displeased with you, Louise.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.’ Louise rushed to the suitcase and began taking Clary’s clothes out.

Polly got out of bed to go and fetch the tray. She sensed that her mother was not so cross as Aunt Villy was with Louise, whom she knew was by now really upset. Then she realised that her mother realised this too. Their eyes met before Sybil said, ‘Have you any idea where she might be?’

Polly thought as hard as she could, but she wasn’t Clary, so how could she think? She shook her head. The mothers went away and Louise cried.

In the end, after Rupert had been told, and the uncles joined in the search, and even Zoë had walked about the tennis court, calling for her, and people had been to the stables, and the gardener’s cottage, and the greenhouses and even into the wood, it was Rachel who found her. She had slipped up to her room to get a coat and join the outside search and there was Clary asleep on the floor. She had made herself a little bed of armchair cushions, and Rachel’s coat was over her. She was fast asleep with her sandshoes beside her. On Rachel’s pillow was a note. ‘Dear Aunt Rach, I’d rather sleep in your room. I hope you don’t mind. I only didn’t undress because of getting cold. Love from Clary.’ Rupert said he’d wake her up and talk to her and then take her to her room, but Rachel said much better to leave her where she was and got her a blanket and a proper pillow.

So coffee was drunk very late that first evening, and then the Duchy and Villy played duets for a bit, which Zoë found awfully boring because it meant that you couldn’t talk. Sybil went to bed first, and Hugh said he’d go with her.

‘What was that all about, do you think?’

‘Well, Louise and Polly are great friends. They see each other nearly every day in London. I expect Clary felt left out.’

‘Here – I’ll do that for you.’ He took her hairpins out and laid them one by one on the palm of the hand she held out to him. ‘You’re too tired,’ he accused, so tenderly that her eyes pricked.

‘Too tired to hold my arms above my head. Thank you, my darling.’

‘I’ll undress you.’

She stood up and pulled the smock dress over her head.

‘Villy made too much of it with Louise. She always does.’

‘Well, that’s not our business.’ He unhooked her brassiere and eased the shoulder straps down her arms. She stepped out of her knickers and kicked off her sandals standing before him, naked, grotesque and beautiful. ‘Where’s your nightie?’

‘On the bed, I think. Darling. You must be sick of me looking like this.’

‘I marvel at it.’ Then he added more lightly, ‘I feel privileged to behold you. Go to bed.’

‘It can’t be that easy for Rupert.’

‘Don’t you worry about him.’

She heaved herself into bed.

‘I wish you weren’t going back on Monday.’

‘I’m sure I could swap with Edward if you wanted me to.’

‘No – no, I don’t. I’d rather have you in London when it’s born.’

He went to the curtains and drew them apart. The light woke him in the morning, but he knew – or thought he knew – that she liked them open.

‘You don’t have to draw them. I really don’t mind.’

‘I like them open,’ he lied. ‘You know I do.’

‘Of course.’ It was no good her wanting them shut when she knew he liked air. The light did wake her in the mornings, but it was a small price to pay for someone she loved so much.

‘… and I honestly think that if only Zoë made the slightest attempt to pull her weight as a stepmother, poor little Clary would be a much easier child.’

‘She’s awfully young, you know. I expect she finds the family en masse a bit overwhelming. I like her,’ he added.

‘I know you do.’ Villy unscrewed her earrings and put them back into their battered little box.

‘Well, it’s good that someone likes her – apart from Rupert, of course.’

‘I don’t think he likes her. He’s mad about her, but that’s not the same thing at all.’

‘That’s all too subtle for me, I’m afraid.’ He spoke indistinctly, because he’d taken out his plate to clean it.

‘Darling, you know perfectly well what I mean. She’s full of SA.’ Villy mentioned this in a facetious tone that did not conceal her disgust.

Edward, who was very well aware of Zoë’s sex appeal but sensed that this was dangerous ground, changed the subject to Teddy and listened amiably while Villy said how worried she was about his eyes, and did Edward think he was leaving his prep school too young, and hadn’t he grown in the last term unbelievably? In fact, she went on chattering after they were in bed and he wanted her to stop.

‘First night of the holidays,’ he said, kissing her, and feeling with one hand for the short, soft curly hair at the back of her neck.

Villy strained away from him for a moment, but she was only turning off the light.

‘… I do try but she simply doesn’t like me!’

‘I think she feels that you don’t like her.’

‘Anyway, it’s Ellen’s job to know where she is. I mean – surely she’s not meant to just look after Neville? She’s meant to be the children’s nurse, isn’t she?’

‘Clary is twelve, a bit too old for a nanny. Still, I agree with you, she should have seen that Clary went to bed.’

Zoë didn’t reply. She felt she had shifted the balance of blame, felt consequently less guilty – able to be softer.

Rupert was cleaning his teeth and spitting into the slop pail. He said, ‘I’ll have a talk with Ellen tomorrow. And Clary, too, of course.’

‘All right, darling.’ It sounded, irritatingly, like a concession (about what?). I don’t want to row about it, he reminded himself. He glanced at her to see how she was getting on with the interminable business of cleaning her face. She was using the transparent stuff from a bottle; it was nearly over. She caught his eye in the dressing-table glass and began one of her slow confiding smiles; he watched the beguiling dimple below her right cheekbone appear, and went over to her, pulling the kimono off her shoulders. Her skin was cool as alabaster, as lustrous as pearls, the warm white of a rose. He thought, but did not say these things; his deepest adoration of her could not be shared; somewhere he knew that her image and herself were not the same, and he could only cling to the image through secrecy.

‘It’s high time I took you to bed,’ he said.

‘All right, darling.’

When he had made love to her, and she had turned, with a sigh of content, onto her side, she said, ‘I will try harder with Clary, I truly promise you I will.’

He remembered, irresistibly, the last time she had said that and answered as he had before, ‘I know that you will.’

My darling, I wonder if you will ever know how much you are that? I don’t know how long this will be, because I am writing this in the common room, where, as you know, everybody resting between bouts of teaching comes for a fag and a cup of coffee, and, unfortunately, a chat. So I get interrupted, and in twelve minutes’ time Jenkins Minor will loom to murder a perfectly harmless little piece of Bach. Last Wednesday was lovely, wasn’t it? I sometimes think, or perhaps I have to think, that we get more out of our precious times together than people who do not have our difficulties, who can meet and be affectionate openly and when they please. But oh! How I miss you! You are the most rare, miraculous creature – a much better person than I in every imaginable way. Sometimes I wish you were not so entirely good – so unselfish, so generous and untiring in your attention and kindness to all. I am greedy; I want you to myself. It’s all right; I know that this isn’t possible; I shall never repeat my unspeakable behaviour of the night we went to the Prom – I shall never hear any Elgar again in my life without shame. I know that you are right; my sister depends upon me in all sorts of ways – the blasted finances as you call them – and you have your parents, who have both come to depend on you. But sometimes I dream of us both becoming free to be alone together. You are all I want. I would live in a wigwam with you or a seaside hotel – the kind with paper carnations on the dinner tables and people with half-bottles of wine with their initials on the label. Or a Tudor bijou gem on the Great West Road, with a pink cherry and a laburnum tree and a crazy-paving path – anywhere, my dearest Ahry, would be transformed by you. If wishes were horses … I thought perhaps that I might—

Oh, Jenkins Minor! The dandruff rained down upon his fiddle from which came the most dreadful sounds – like some small animal caught in a trap. I sound cruel, but he lied to me about his practising – he is not a winning child. What I had been going to say was that if I rang early next week, perhaps the dear Duchy would have me for a night? Or failing that, to luncheon? Or – most bold of all – perhaps you could meet me at the station, and we could lunch somewhere in Battle and go for a walk? These are only wild suggestions; you need only say when I ring that it wouldn’t do for it not to do. Just to hear your voice will be wonderful. Write to me, my dear heart, write to me I beg—

‘Aunt Rach?’

Instinctively, she folded the letter and put it out of sight. ‘Yes, my dude. I’m here.’

‘Is it all right? You aren’t cross?’

Rachel got out of her bed and knelt on the floor beside her niece. ‘I was most honoured to be chosen.’ She stroked Clary’s fringe back from her forehead. ‘We’ll have a lovely talk tomorrow. Go to sleep now. Are you warm enough?’

Clary looked surprised. ‘I don’t know. How do I feel?’

‘Warm enough.’ Rachel leaned down and kissed her.

‘If I’d really got rabies, you wouldn’t be able to kiss me ‘cos I’d bite, wouldn’t I?’

‘What have you been reading?’

‘Nothing. Someone told me about it at school. A horrible girl from South America. You wouldn’t like her, she’s so horrible.’

‘Goodnight, Clary, Off you go.’

‘Are you going to sleep now?’

‘Yes.’

So then, of course, she had to put the letter away and turn out the light.

On Saturday, Villy went riding with her father-in-law, Edward and Hugh played tennis with Simon and Teddy, Rupert took Zoë out to lunch in Rye, Polly and Louise took turns to have riding lessons on Joey, who, caught by Wren and doomed to an hour’s trotting and cantering pointlessly round the same old field, got his own back by puffing himself up when he was saddled so that the girths would hardly go round his huge grass-fed belly and then deflating so that the saddle slipped sideways and decanted Polly onto the ground. With Louise, he only managed to switch his tail so sharply that he stung her eyes when she was trying to mount him.

Clary took Lydia to see butterflies and then they found a heap of sand left by the builders and Clary had an idea. It’s quite a long idea,’ she said, sternly, because Neville was tagging along and she wanted to put him off, but it didn’t work. ‘I want to be in the idea, he said, so in the end she let him. Under her direction, they set about moving nearly all the sand to a secret place behind the potting shed.

Rachel picked more raspberries, and black and red currants for Mrs Cripps to make summer puddings, typed excerpts from John Evelyn’s Diaries for her father’s book, and finally joined Sybil under the monkey puzzle to tack yards of rufflette onto dark green chintz for the Duchy to machine after luncheon.

The Duchy had her morning interview with Mrs Cripps. The wreck of the salmon was inspected; it would not stretch to being served cold again with salad – was to be turned into croquettes for dinner to be followed by a Charlotte Russe (this was a compromise between them; Mrs Cripps did not like making croquettes, and the Duchy thought that Charlotte Russe was too rich in the evening). For Sunday lunch they would have the roast lamb and summer pudding. That settled, she was free to spend the morning in her garden; dead-heading, clipping the four pyramids of box that were stationed at the end of the herbaceous borders guarding the sundial with Billy to sweep up and clear away the clippings.

By noon, everybody was too hot to go on doing all these things. The fathers felt that they had worked long enough on Teddy’s serve and Simon’s backhand and the boys were both frantic for lunch – still an hour away – and went on their traditional and lightning raid upon the tins of biscuits by their parents’ beds. Today, it was easy; they swiped the lot from Uncle Rupert’s room, knowing he was out, and ate them in the downstairs lavatory.

Villy, after the ride, had to be taken by William round the new buildings. She was longing to change out of her riding clothes, but her father-in-law, fully dressed in flannel shirt, lemon gaberdine waistcoat and tweed jacket with gaberdine breeches and leather boots, seemed impervious to the heat, and spent a good hour explaining not only what they had done but the alternative plans that had been rejected.

Louise and Polly, abandoned by Wren who said he had to get back and see the other horses, had one more turn each on Joey, who was sweating a lot and less and less inclined to co-operate; he had taken to ambling and stopping to snatch mouthfuls of grass. ‘He smells lovely, but he’s not very faithful,’ Polly said, as she dismounted. ‘Want another turn?’

Louise shook her head. ‘If only there were two of him we could go for a proper ride. Hold him while I take the saddle off.’ Polly, who secretly did not like riding nearly as much as Louise, agreed. What she was thinking was that now they could have the rest of the day doing much nicer things. She stroked Joey’s tender nose, but he nudged her impatiently – it was sugar not sentiment he was after. When Louise had heaved the saddle off his back, she unstrapped his bridle and slipped it over his face. He stood for a moment, and then, tossing his head with a theatrical gesture, cantered a few paces until he was out of reach. ‘I’m afraid he really doesn’t like us much,’ Louise said. She felt that she had the reputation for being marvellous with animals and Joey did not behave at all as though he agreed with this.

‘He likes you better than me,’ said loyal Polly; although it had never been mentioned, she knew how Louise felt. They trudged on down the cart track from the field to the stables taking turns with the saddle.

Clary had had a good morning. The sand had all been heaped into an old cold frame in the kitchen garden. The glass lid had long since gone and the bottom made an ideal boundary for her idea. First of all the sand had to be patted completely smooth: they tried with bare feet, but hands turned out to be better. Clary was best at this, and in order to have the peace and quiet to do it properly she sent the others to fetch things.

‘What sort of things?’ Neville was getting fractious: ‘What are we trying to do? Why don’t we get some water and make mud?’ he complained.

‘Shut up. If you don’t want to play with us, you can just go away. Or you can do what Clary says. She’s the oldest.’

‘I don’t want to go away. I do want to play. I want to know what we’re supposed to be doing. I don’t want to waste my time,’ he added rather grandly.

‘Your time!’ Lydia scoffed, trying to think of the smallest thing she knew. ‘It’s not worth a hundred or a thousand.’

Clary said, ‘We’re making a garden. We need hedges, and gravel for paths, and – yes – and a lake! And trees, and flowers – we need everything! One of you collect the gravel, only the tiniest gravel. You do that, Neville. Get a seed box out of the greenhouse for it.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘I want you to guard the sand. And scrape moss off the wall at the bottom there,’ she added, as Lydia began to look disappointed.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll be back soon.’

On her way back from her successful and unnoticed raid in the house – Zoë’s nail scissors out of her manicure set and the small round mirror out of the maid’s lavatory – she came upon a trug full of box clippings (Billy had been called to his dinner). Her mind was a riot of possibilities: with the scissors, she could plant grass and cut it short so that it would be a lawn, and the box would make a tiny hedge to edge the gravel path – or it could be in a pattern for flower beds. There was no end to what she might do to make the most beautiful garden in the world. For once, she was glad that Polly and Louise weren’t about; they might have had ideas, and she wanted it to be entirely her own.

When she got back, she found that Lydia had tired of collecting moss, had picked some daisies, was sticking them just anywhere into the sand. ‘I’m putting in the flowers for you,’ she said. Clary let her do it at one end of the sand. Lydia was small and you couldn’t expect too much and she knew that if you were too small you didn’t like being made to feel it.

Just as Neville came back with hardly any gravel, but a whole lot of other things that wouldn’t have been the slightest use, they heard Ellen calling them to come in to get ready for lunch.

‘It’s a deadly secret,’ Clary warned. ‘You mustn’t say a word to them. Say we’ve been playing in the orchard. We’ll come out after lunch and do all the proper making.’

‘We have to have blasted rests,’ Neville reminded her. ‘For a whole blasted hour.’

‘It isn’t fair!’

‘I used to have to,’ Clary said quickly before Lydia could work herself up. ‘When you’re twelve, you won’t have to.’

‘Supposing I don’t get to twelve?’ It seemed to her very unlikely.

‘I’ll get to it first,’ Neville said. ‘There’ll be one holiday when you’ll be the only one having a rest.’

‘Don’t quarrel. If you go in all smeary with tears, they’ll ask what we’ve been doing.’

They composed their faces to uniform conspiratorial blandness and went up to the house.

At one o’clock Eileen sounded the gong for lunch.

‘Gracious! I haven’t done the bag!’ Rachel sprang to her feet, felt the familiar twinge in her back that seemed always to be there when she made an unconsidered movement, and went quickly into the house. ‘Don’t worry about the curtains,’ she called, in case Sybil should tire herself trying to fold and carry them. The bag, kept in a drawer of the card table in the drawing room, was a small linen affair with R.C. embroidered in blue cotton chain stitch. It had been Rachel’s school brush and comb bag, but now it contained eight cardboard squares, six of them blank and two marked D.R. As the children came downstairs from washing for lunch, they each pulled a square out of the bag. This ritual was because the Duchy had decreed that two children should be allowed into the dining room for lunch in order that they should learn how to behave at meals with the grown-ups; the method of choosing had been evolved to stop squabbling and the perennial allegations of injustice. Today, Simon got one of the tickets, and then Clary.

‘I don’t want it,’ she said, put it back like lightning, and drew a blank. ‘My father’s out, you see,’ she said quickly to Rachel. Really, she was afraid that Lydia and Neville might spill some beans about the garden if she was not there to stop them.

Rachel let this pass. ‘But next time you must stick to the rules,’ she said mildly.

Neville was late for lunch. He came down with Ellen holding his hand (a sure sign of humiliation and wrongdoing).

‘I’m sorry we’re late. Neville had lost his sandshoes.’

‘I only lost one of them.’ The fuss that people could make about one miserable shoe was beyond him. In the end, Teddy got the other ticket for which he was profoundly grateful. He was not ready yet to make the difficult change from an all-male society at school – except for Matron and the French mistress, both objects of continual, covert derision – to eating and talking with all these women and babies.

He decided to sit next to Dad and Uncle Hugh and then they could talk either about cricket or, possibly, about submarines, in which he had lately become interested. Lunch was hot boiled gammon and parsley sauce (the Duchy had a Victorian disregard for weather when planning menus), with new potatoes and broad beans followed by treacle tart. Simon loathed broad beans, but Sybil ate them for him. She’s a pretty broad bean herself, he thought and then choked trying not to laugh at such a marvellous joke; he didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, and nobody would like being called broad except a bean. This set him off again; Dad hit him on the back, and his plate fell out onto the table cloth – a jolly embarrassing meal.

Teddy ate an enormous lunch – two helpings of everything and then biscuits and cheese. He had decided to make Simon play tennis immediately after lunch because later on the grown-ups would probably hog the court. Dad had said that he could practise his serve on his own, but that wasn’t much fun if there was nobody to return the balls and, worse, nobody to tell him whether they were in or not. If he worked at it, he could end up playing for England. The thought of the board at Wimbledon Cazalet v. Budge made the back of his neck prickle. BRILLIANT NEW PLAYER ANNIHILATES BUDGE! Would be the headline. Of course, it might not be Budge by then, but whoever it was – Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, it would be a pretty exciting week. The thing would be to get Fred Perry to coach him; there couldn’t be anyone better in the world than Fred. It was rotten that one couldn’t play tennis in winter at school, but he’d be able to play squash or racquets to keep his eye in. He decided to write to Fred Perry to see what he would advise. Dad and Uncle Hugh had been no good to talk to: they’d been arguing about whether to get something called a Dictaphone in their office or not. Dad wanted one because he said it would be more efficient, but Uncle Hugh said it took the same amount of time to dictate to a secretary as it did to a machine, and he believed in the personal touch. The women were talking about babies and rotten things like that. God! He was glad he wasn’t a woman. Having to wear skirts and being much weaker – hardly ever doing anything really interesting like going to the South Pole or being a racing driver, and Carstairs said that blood poured out of them in streams from between their legs whenever there was a full moon, an unlikely tale because there was a full moon every month and obviously they’d die from loss of blood, and, anyway, he’d never seen any of them doing it, but Carstairs had a gory nature, he was always on about vampire bats and the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Black Death. He was going to be a detective when he grew up – on murder cases; Teddy was glad he wouldn’t be seeing any more of Carstairs. His new school loomed up in his mind like an iceberg: what he could see of it was frightening enough and that was only a fifth (or was it a sixth?), as frightening as he knew it would be when he actually had to go to it. Ages away – the holidays had hardly started. He caught Simon’s eye across the table and made a batting movement with his right arm which knocked over his glass of water.

Lunch in the hall was difficult for Clary in ways she hadn’t thought of. Neville and Lydia behaved beautifully, didn’t say a word about their garden, and Clary offered to look for and find Neville’s missing shoe, which went down well with Ellen. But Polly, who felt guilty that she and Louise had again left Clary out by going off and riding together and not even asking her whether she wanted to come, was now suggesting all kinds of things that she and Louise would do in the afternoon with Clary, like go to the stream in the far wood and make a dam, and when Clary didn’t seem very keen on that, a tennis tournament, or making a log house in the wood. ‘Well, what would you like to do?’ she said at last.

Clary felt Lydia’s and Neville’s eyes fixed on her. ‘Go to the beach,’ she said. The beach meant cars and grownups, so she knew that Polly and Louise couldn’t do anything about that. They gave up; it was common knowledge, Louise said, that they were going to the beach on Monday and not before.

After lunch, Villy drove Sybil to Battle to buy flannel and white wool. They had made this plan at breakfast, but had a tacit agreement to keep quiet about their trip in order that no children should clamour to join them. Now they drove in a peaceful silence, easing comfortably into their customary summer relationship. They saw each other in London, naturally, but this was more because of their husbands’ affection for one another than from their own choice. But, since they both became life members of the Cazalet family at about the same time, they had had years of natural proximity to develop an undemanding intimacy of a kind they did not either of them have with anyone else. They had married the brothers two years after the war: Sybil in January, Edward and Villy the following May. The brothers had suggested a double wedding, had even mooted a double honeymoon, but this had been averted by Villy having to finish her contract with the Russian ballet, and Sybil wanting to marry before her father’s leave was up and he went back to India. Sybil’s godmother had provided the necessary background (her mother had died in India the previous year), Edward had been best man and they had gone to Rome for their honeymoon – Hugh said France was too full of things that he wanted to forget. Edward had taken them to see Villy dance with the ballet at the Alhambra and Sybil had been deeply impressed by Villy actually being a professional dancer. They had seen Petroushka (Villy had been one of the Russian peasant women) and Sybil, whose first visit to the ballet it was, had been overwhelmed by Massine in the title role. Afterwards they had waited for Villy to come out of the stage door wearing a coat with a white fur collar, and her hair – long in those days – done in a bun and a little silver arrow sticking in the side of it. They had all gone to the Savoy for supper, and Villy seemed the most sophisticated and glamorous person Sybil had ever met. Under the coat, she wore a black chiffon dress embroidered with brilliant green and blue crystal beads that showed her elegant narrow knees, with green satin shoes to match that made Sybil’s beige stamped velvet trimmed with Irish lace seem dull. She had been bubbling with energy and, egged on by Edward, chattered all evening about the Russian company and touring; about Paris, and rehearsing with Matisse dropping paint pots onto their heads, and not being paid for weeks, living on a pint of milk a day and lying in the beds between rehearsals and performances; of Monte Carlo and the glittering audiences; of how Massine and Diaghilev quarrelled, and how some of the company gambled away their salaries in a single night.

It had seemed to her then incredible and heroic of Villy to give up such a life for marriage, but Villy, who seemed as much in love with Edward as he was with her, made light of it. They were married from Villy’s home in Albert Place, and her father composed an organ suite for the service which was noticed in The Times. Villy had cut off her hair and was fashionably shingled for the wedding, which Sybil had attended feeling terribly queasy with her first pregnancy – the one that had ended with a stillborn son. Apart from being married to brothers, they had little in common to begin with but with the Cazalets, being married to brothers meant steady, continuous meetings: evenings when the brothers played chess, winter holidays when they went skiing – Sybil was hopeless at that, invariably twisted an ankle, once broke her leg, while Villy whirled down the most daring runs with a verve and skill that earned her much local admiration. They played bridge and tennis. They went to theatres and to restaurants where they dined and danced. One evening, at the Hungaria, Villy said something in Russian to the leader of the orchestra, and he played some Delibes and Villy danced by herself on the cleared floor and everyone applauded. When she returned to their table and Edward said perfunctorily, ‘Well done, darling.’ Sybil had noticed tears in her eyes, and wondered whether giving up her career had turned out to be so easy for Villy after all. Villy never mentioned her dancing days again, continued in her role of wife and, subsequently, mother of Louise and then Teddy and Lydia as though it had never happened. But Sybil had observed her restless energy, which, like water, streamed out in any direction it could find. She got a loom and wove linen and silk. She learned to play the zither and the flute. She learned to ride, and was soon exercising horses for the Life Guards – one of the two women in London allowed to do so. She worked for the Red Cross, took blind children to the seaside. She sailed a dinghy in small boat races. She taught herself Russian; for a short time she joined a Gjieff sect (Sybil only found out about this because Villy tried to make her join it too). Some of the crazes – like the sect – did not last long. Resisting a sudden urge to say, ‘Are you happy?’ she said, ‘I suppose the shops in Battle may be shut.’

‘Good Lord! Of course, they will be. How stupid! We could go on to Hastings.’

‘The shop at Watlington’ll be open.’

‘Will it?’ Villy had slowed and was looking for somewhere to turn.

‘It somehow always is. They’ll have white wool. And almost certainly flannel.’

‘Right.’ Villy stopped at someone’s drive and then backed into it.

‘It seems so inefficient. If only I’d kept Simon’s things. But I never thought I’d need them again.’

‘I chucked everything out, too. One can’t keep everything,’ Villy said. ‘I’ll help you, if you like.’

‘It would be angelic. I’ll never forget that christening robe you made for Teddy.’ It had been the finest white lawn, embroidered in white thread with wild flowers, and all the seams joined by drawn threadwork. The sort of work usually done by nuns.

‘You can borrow it, if you like. There won’t be time to make another of those.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I’m just aiming at four flannel nighties and a shawl.’

They were passing the white gates of the house on their way up the hill to the shop at Watlington. Villy said, ‘I’m sure the Duchy would help.’

‘She’s making one of her lovely tussore smocks for Clary’s birthday.’

‘Goodness! I’d forgotten that. What are you giving her?’

‘I can’t think. I don’t know really what she likes. She’s not a very happy little girl, is she? Rupert says she’s not doing well at school either. A bad report, order marks, and she doesn’t seem to have made any friends.’

‘I shouldn’t think Zoë would be very nice to them if she did.’

Neither of them liked Zoë, and both knew that they were about to embark upon a Zoë talk, which happened every holiday and always ended by them saying that they really must stop. This time they stopped because they had reached their destination – an old white-painted clapboard farmhouse, the ground floor of which had been rather casually converted into a shop. It sold a little of everything: groceries, vegetables, packets of seeds, chocolates, cigarettes, elastic and buttons, knitting wool, eggs, bread, Panama hats, trugs, willow-pattern mugs and brown teapots, flowered Tootal cottons, fly papers, bird seed and dog biscuits, door mats and kettles. Mrs Cramp produced a roll of white flannel and cut the five yards required. Mr Cramp, at the other counter, was cutting bacon in the machine. A heavily encrusted fly paper hung above it, and banged against his bald head every time he collected a slice and put it on the scales, and sometimes a long-dead fly fell like a dried currant onto the counter. His customer, in the middle of narrating some indeterminate misfortune, fell silent when Sybil and Villy entered the shop, and only the weather – not a drop of rain for two weeks and looking as though it would hold up for the harvest – was discussed while the ladies were in the shop.

‘And white wool, Mrs Hugh. Paton’s two-ply; would that be what you were after? Or we do have the fleecy Shetland.’

‘I’ll make the shawl,’ said Villy. They chose the Shetland, and Sybil bought a reel of white cotton.

‘Mrs Cazalet Senior keeping well, is she? That’s right.’

The flannel was wrapped in a piece of soft brown paper and tied with string. The wool was put into a paper bag. Mrs Cramp avoided Sybil’s stomach like title plague.

But as soon as Villy had left the shop, she said, ‘She’s near her time, or I’m a Dutchman.’

And Mrs Miles, who had been buying the bacon, said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it was twins.’

Mrs Cramp was shocked. It was her prerogative to remark on her customers. ‘They don’t have twins,’ she said. ‘Not ladies.’

In the car, Villy said, ‘Do you think it would be a good idea if Clary left school and joined our two with Miss Milliment?’

‘Very good for Clary. But do you think Rupert could afford it?’

‘Two pounds ten a week! It must be cheaper than her school.’

‘He probably gets a special rate for being a schoolmaster. He may not pay at all, except for the extras.’

‘Our two have extras.’

‘Rachel might help with those. Or the Duchy might speak to the Brig. Or you could – on one of your rides. He’d probably listen to you – you get on so well with him.’

‘Let’s talk to Rupert first.’ Villy ignored this compliment as she did all the others these days. ‘There would be fares, of course. She’d have to walk to Shepherd’s Bush and take the Underground. But I do feel it would be a family atmosphere for her, and that’s what she needs. I don’t think she gets much of that at home.’

Sybil said, ‘Of course, Zoë will start having a family one of these days.’

‘God forbid! I’m sure she doesn’t want babies.’

Sybil said, ‘As we all know, it isn’t always a question of wanting them.’

Villy glanced at her, startled. ‘Darling! Did you – not—’

‘Not really. Of course I’m pleased about it now.’

‘Of course you are.’ They were both treading water: not exactly out of their depths, but not wanting to feel their ground.

Most of Rupert’s and Zoë’s day was very good. They drove to Rye, quite slowly because Rupert was enjoying the first morning of his holidays and being in the country and the beautiful day. They drove past fields of wheat with poppies and fields of hops that were nearly ripe, through woods of oak and Spanish chestnut and lanes whose high banks were thick with wild strawberries and stitchwort and ferns, and hedges decorated by the last of the dog-roses bleached nearly white by the sun, through villages with white clinker-built cottages with their gardens blazing with hollyhocks and phlox and roses and sometimes a pond with white ducks, small grey churches with yew and lichen-covered tombstones, past fields of early hay, and farms with steaming manure and brown and white chickens finding things to eat. Sometimes they stopped, because Rupert wanted to look properly at things, and Zoë, although she didn’t really know why he wanted to, sat contentedly watching him. She loved his throat with the large Adams apple, and the way his dark blue eyes narrowed when he was staring at things and the small half-apologetic smile he gave her when he had looked enough, let in the clutch and resumed driving.

‘Oh, this country!’ he said once. ‘To me, it is the best in England.’

‘Have you been everywhere else?’

He laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just indulging in a spot of prejudice!’

On the last of these stops he got out of the car; she followed him, and they went and leaned on a gate. They were on a crest of land, where they could look down and away for miles with all the things that they had seen separately on the drive spread out before them in a vast expanse, green and golden and gilded, varnished by sunlight. Rupert took her hand.

‘Darling. Don’t you think that’s a ripping view?’

‘Yes. And the sky is such a lovely blue.’ She thought for a moment, and then added, ‘It’s the kind of blue that nothing else actually is, isn’t it?

‘You’re perfectly right … what a good remark!’ He squeezed her hand, delighted with her. ‘It’s the kind of thing that is so obvious that nobody says it. Notices it, I mean,’ he added, seeing her face. ‘No, really, Zoë darling, I mean that.’ And he did: he so much wanted her to be an appreciator – of something other than themselves.

In Rye he bought her presents. They were walking down one of the steep roads to the harbour and there was a very small shop window crammed with jewellery, small pieces of silver and, in front, there was a tray of antique rings. Rupert decided that he wanted to buy her one so they went inside. He chose a rose diamond one with black and white enamel round the hoop, but she didn’t like it. She wanted an emerald with rose diamonds round it, but it was twenty-five pounds – too much. So she settled for a fire opal surrounded by seed pearls and that was ten pounds, but Rupert got it for eight. They didn’t know it was a fire opal until the man told them, just thought it was a marvellous dazzling orange colour, but Zoë was much keener on it once she knew. ‘It’s really unusual!’ she exclaimed, holding out her white hand for them to see.

‘Wouldn’t suit everyone, madam, but it’s perfect on you.’

‘There, madam,’ said Rupert when they were outside. ‘And what would madam like to do next?’

She wanted a book to read in the evening when everyone was sewing and playing the piano and things. So they went to a bookshop, and she chose Gone With The Wind, which she knew everyone was reading and was said to have good passionate scenes in it. Then they had lunch in a pub – or rather in the garden outside it: ham and salad and Heinz’s mayonnaise and half a pint of bitter for Rupert and a shandy for Zoë. They didn’t talk about the children at lunch, or afterwards, when they went to Winchelsea because Rupert wanted to see the Strachan glass there, but as they were driving back to Home Place, Zoë said, ‘Oh, darling, we’ve had such a lovely time, and I do love my ring.’

Rupert said, ‘Haven’t we just? Now we must go back to the bosom of the family. The madding crowd.’

‘Madding?’

‘It’s a book by Thomas Hardy.’

‘Oh.’ What a lot he knew.

‘And we must think of something splendid to do with the children tomorrow.’

‘I should think they are quite happy with their cousins, and everything.’

‘Yes. But I meant with all of them. Must do our bit.’

She was silent. He added gently, ‘You know, darling, I think you’d feel quite differently about family life if you had a baby. If we had one,’ he added.

‘Not yet. I don’t feel old enough.’

‘Well, one day you will be.’ She was twenty-two – a young twenty-two, he told himself.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we could afford it. Not unless you get another job. Or become famous, or something. We aren’t rich – like Hugh and Edward. They have a proper staff to do things. Sybil and Villy don’t have to cook.’

It was his turn for silence. Ellen did most of the cooking, and he and Clary were out to lunch every day, but poor little Zoë did hate cooking, he knew that, had not got much beyond the frying pan or tins in three years.

‘Well,’ he said at last, he couldn’t bear to disrupt their day out, ‘it was just a thought. Think about it.’

Just a thought! If he had had any idea of how she felt about having a baby, he wouldn’t even mention it. Her fear, which amounted to panic, meant that she never got beyond her imagination of pregnancy – getting larger and larger, her ankles swelling, waddling about, feeling sick – and the labour, frightful pain that might go on for hours and hours, might indeed kill her as it did some people she had read about in novels. And not only read about: look at Rupert’s first wife! She’d died that way. But even if she didn’t die, her figure would be ruined: she would have flabby breasts with the nipples too large, like Villy and Sybil whom she had seen in their bathing suits, her waist would be thick and she would have those fearful stripes on her stomach and thighs – Sybil again; Villy seemed to have escaped that – and varicose veins – Villy, but not Sybil – and, of course, Rupert would no longer love her. He’d pretend to for a bit, she supposed, but she would know. Because the one thing she knew for certain was that her appearance was what people were interested in or cared about: she hadn’t anything else, really, to attract or keep anyone with. She had used it all her life to get what she wanted, and she had never wanted anything so much as Rupert. So now she must use it to keep him. She knew, without thinking about it too much, that she wasn’t clever, either at doing things or at thinking about them; her mother had always said that this wasn’t important if you had the looks, and she had learned that very well. Why didn’t Rupert understand all this? He’d got two children anyway, and they cost a lot and were a constant source of anxiety. Sometimes she wished that he was thirty years older, too old for anyone but herself to care about – too old, anyway, to want to be a father, content with just being with her. In the three years of their marriage, he had only talked about having a baby twice before: once at the beginning, when he had assumed that she would want to get pregnant, and then about six months later when she had stupidly complained about what a nuisance Dutch caps were. He had said, ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. Why don’t you just stop using one, and let nature take its course?’ She had got out of that somehow – said that she wanted to get used to being married first or something, anything to stop him talking about it – and after that she had put the cap in long before he came from the school and never said any more about it at all. She had thought that perhaps he had given up the idea; now it was horribly clear that he hadn’t. The rest of the drive home was silent.

Clary worked hard all afternoon. To begin with, she worked feverishly against time, because she knew that when Lydia and Nev had finished their rest they would rush out and want to do things and get in the way and do things wrong. But they didn’t come out; in fact, the nurses had taken them for a hot, sulky walk up to the shop at Watlington, but as the time went by and they didn’t come, she felt able to take things more slowly, to stop and consider the next thing to do. The mirror was in place, sunk in the sand; it looked like water, and she edged it with moss which made it even better. She made a lovely hedge of tiny pieces of box stuck close together in the sand – had to do that twice, because she hadn’t made the sand firm enough to start with. Then she made a gravel path that ran beside the hedge to the lake, and then it seemed to need another hedge on its bare side, so she did that. Poor old Lydia’s daisies were drooping by now, so she pulled them out; it was no good putting flowers in, she needed plants. Also, she thought they ought to be planted in earth, very tiny fine earth, or they would die. She got some potting compost out of the potting shed and made a bed that started square and ended rather egg-shaped. She collected some scarlet pimpernel, and some speedwell – straggly, but it filled up the space – and some stone crop off the kitchen-garden wall and a very small fern. That helped, but there was still a lot of room, so she collected some heads of lavender and stuck them at the back in bunches. They looked like a plant if you put them like that, and they were dry things who wouldn’t mind just being stalks. They looked very good. It’ll take weeks to make the whole garden, she thought. It was one of the lovely things about it. She needed trees, and bushes, and perhaps a little seat for people to sit by the lake which she had constantly to polish with some spit, her finger and one of her socks, because it got sandy at the least little thing. There was the lawn to make, which would be tufts of grass planted close together and trimmed with Zoë’s nail scissors. The bell went for tea, and she didn’t want to go, but they’d be sure to come and find her if she didn’t. So she went, taking Neville’s shoe with her to please Ellen. Walking back to the house, she thought that perhaps she would like someone to see her garden: Dad, or Aunt Rach? Both of them, she decided.

After tea, all the children played the Seeing Game – one of the traditional holiday games devised by themselves. Teddy half felt that he had outgrown it, and Simon pretended to feel the same, but this was not true. It had been invented by Louise and was a kind of hide and seek, only you didn’t catch people; it counted if you saw them and could identify who they were, and involved constant mobility on the part of the hunted, who, when caught, were locked in an old dog kennel until rescued by a friend. The hunter won only if he succeeded in catching everybody and incarcerating them. Lydia and Neville, who spent most of the time in the kennel as they were easy to catch, enjoyed it most, because they were playing with the others, although they wailed that it was unfair to be caught so much, when Polly, for instance, was hardly caught at all. Hugh and Edward played tennis.

Villy and the Duchy played two pianos – Bach concern – and Sybil and Rachel cut out the nightdresses on the table in the morning room. Nanny read bits of Nursery World aloud to Ellen while she did the ironing. The Brig sat in his study writing a chapter about Burma and its teak forests for his book. The day, which had been hot and golden with a sky of unbroken blue, was settling to longer shadows with midges and gnats and young rabbits coming out into the orchard.

Flossy, who allowed Mrs Cripps to own her because of Mrs Cripps’s connections with food, got up from her basket chair in the servants’ hall, stretched her totally rested body, and slipped out of the casement window for her evening’s hunting. She was a tortoiseshell, with hard-wearing fur and, as Rachel had once observed, like most well-fed English people she hunted merely for the sport and was very unsporting in her methods. She knew exactly when the rabbits went into the orchard, and one of them, at least, would not stand a chance against her formidable experience.

When Rupert and Zoë returned from their outing, she had said that she was going to get her bath in before all the children and tennis players used the hot water. Rupert, alone in their bedroom, wandered to the window from which he could see his sister and Sybil sewing under the monkey puzzle. They sat in basket chairs on the smooth green lawn backed by the green-black yew hedge against which their summer dresses – Rachel’s blue and Sybil’s green had a kind of aqueous delicacy. A wicker table was set between them, littered with a sewing basket, a tea tray with willow-patterned cups; a pile of creamy material completed the scene. He did not need even the corner of the herbaceous border on one side, nor the corner of the white gate to the drive at the other. He wanted to paint, but by the time he got his materials prepared, they might be gone: he wanted to draw them from the window where he stood, but Zoë would be back and that would not do. He rummaged in his canvas bag for his largest drawing block and packet of oil pastels and slipped down the smaller staircase to the front door.

‘It’s not fair! You never said you’d stopped playing!’

Louise opened the kennel door.

‘We’re telling you now.’

‘We didn’t know till now. It’s not fair!’

‘Look, we’ve only just stopped,’ Polly said. ‘We couldn’t tell you before because we hadn’t.’

Lydia and Neville stumped out of the kennel. They had not wanted the game to stop and they hated it not being fair. Neither of them had had the chance to be the See-er.

‘Teddy and Simon are bored of it. They’ve gone on a hunt. There aren’t enough of us for a proper game.’ Clary joined them.

‘Anyway, it’s time for your baths. They’ll be coming for you any minute.’

‘God blast!’

‘Take no notice of him,’ Louise said in her most irritating voice.

‘Honestly, Louise, you are sickening! Too, too sickening!’

When Lydia said that she sounded exactly like Mummy’s friend, Hermione; Louise could not help admiring the mimicry, but she wasn’t going to say so. She didn’t want two actresses in the family, thank you very much. She gave Polly their secret signal and they ran – suddenly, and very fast – away from Lydia and Neville, who started to follow them, but were quickly out of sight. The wails of rage only drew Ellen’s and Nanny’s attention to their whereabouts and they got carried off for their baths.

When Clary went to find Dad and Aunt Rachel to show them her garden, she found she couldn’t have either of them. Dad was sitting on the large wooden table used for outdoor tea drawing Aunt Rach and Aunt Syb, alternatively staring at them, then making sudden irritable marks on his pad. She stood watching him for a bit: he was sort of frowning, and every now and then he drew a deep, sighing breath. Sometimes he rubbed the marks he had made with his finger. In his left hand he held a small bunch of chalks, and sometimes he stuffed the one he had been using back and took another one. Clary thought that she could hold the bunch of chalks for him, but as she moved nearer to say this, Aunt Rach put her finger to her lips so she didn’t say anything. And she couldn’t go and ask Aunt Rach to come because then she would be in the picture, so she just sat down on the grass and watched her father. A lock of his hair kept falling forward across his bony forehead and he kept pushing or shaking it back. I could hold his hair back for him, she thought. Why can’t there be something like that I could do for him, so that he couldn’t do without me? ‘Clary is indispensable,’ he would say to people who came to admire his painting. By now, she was grown up, with her hair in a bun and skirts down her legs like the aunts, and her face was thin and interesting, like Dad’s, and people – in taxi cabs and orangeries like Kensington Gardens – proposed to her, but she would give them all up for Dad. She would never marry because of being so terrifically indispensable, and since Zoë had died from eating potted meat in a heatwave – known to kill you according to the Duchy – she was all that Dad had in the world. Dad would be famous, and she would be …

‘Rupert! Where did you put my book? Rupert!’

Clary looked up, and there was Zoë in her kimono shouting through the open bedroom window.

There was a pause as she watched his face change, and then change again into patient good humour.

‘You must have left it in the car.’

‘I thought you brought it in.’

‘I didn’t, darling.’ Turning to look at her, he spied Clary. ‘Clary’ll fetch it for you.’

‘What book?’ She got to her feet reluctantly. If Dad asked her she’d have to get it.

‘Gone With The Wind,’ called Zoë. ‘Bring it up to me, would you, Clary darling, there’s an angel.’

Clary trotted off. She’d never felt less like an angel in her life. Zoë had only said that to make it sound as though she was fond of her, and she jolly well wasn’t. And I’m not fond of her, she thought, not remotely, the tiniest bit fond. I hate her! One of the reasons she hated Zoë was feeling like that. She didn’t hate anyone else, which showed she wasn’t a hating person, but Zoë made her feel horrible, and sometimes wicked: things like potted meat would never occur to her about anyone else. But she’d thought of dozens of ways in which Zoë might die, and if Zoë died from any of them it would be her fault. She hoped there would be another way that she hadn’t thought of; must be – people could die from nearly anything. A snake bite or a ghost frightening her to death, or something Ellen called a hernia that sounded pretty bad. There she went, making it more likely to be her fault. She shut her eyes and held her breath to stop her thoughts. Then she opened the car door, and found the book on the back seat.

The evening settled into a hot, still night. Delirious moths rammed the parchment lampshades again and again and silvery powder from their collisions fell from time to time onto Sybil’s sewing. She had been given the whole sofa so that she could put her feet up. The Brig and Edward were playing chess and smoking Havana cigars. They played very slowly, with occasional admiring grunts at the other’s skill. The Duchy was setting in the puff sleeves of the tussore frock for Clary. It was richly smocked in cherry silk: the Duchy was famous for her smocking. Zoë was curled in a battered armchair reading Gone With The Wind. Hugh, in charge of the gramophone, had chosen Schubert’s posthumous B flat sonata – known to be one of the Duchy’s favourites – and was listening with his eyes closed. Villy was embroidering one of her enormous set of table mats in fine black cross stitch on heavy linen. Rupert lay in a chair at the end of the room, legs stretched straight out, arms hanging over the chair arms, half listening to the music, half watching the others. How like their father Edward was, he began. The same forehead, with the hair growing from a centre peak and receding – in Edward’s case far more than their father’s – each side of it. The same bushy eyebrows, the same blue-grey eyes (although Edward’s way of looking you straight in the eye came from the Duchy, one of whose chief charms it was. ‘I don’t agree with you at all,’ she would say, and you liked her for it), high cheekbones, military moustache. The Brig’s, apart from being white, was longer and more luxuriant; Edward kept his to a military bristle. Their hands were the same shape with long fingers and rather concave nails, the Brig’s speckled with liver spots, Edward’s with hair growing on the backs. The curious thing about moustaches was how you lost the mouth; it became an unconsidered feature, much as he supposed a chin would that sported a beard. Edward, though, had a glamour that seemed to come from neither parent; although undoubtedly he was the best looking of the three of them; the glamour came from his apparent unconsciousness of either his appearance or his effect upon other people. Clothes, for instance, became glamorous simply because he was wearing them – tonight a white silk shirt with a bottle-green foulard silk scarf knotted round his throat and linen trousers of the same colour, but when you came to think about it, he must have thought about his outfit, chosen those things – so perhaps he wasn’t so unconscious, after all? He certainly knew that women found him attractive. Even those who did not were always immediately aware of him: Zoë, for instance, said that although he wasn’t her type, she could see that he might be very attractive to some. Part of it was the way in which Edward always seemed to be enjoying himself, to be living in the present – to be engrossed in it, never appearing to consider anything either side of it.

Rupert, being six and seven years younger than his brothers, had escaped the war – had been a schoolboy while his brothers were in France. Hugh had been the first to go – joined the Coldstream Guards – and Edward, unable to join him because of his age, got himself into the Machine Gun Corps a few months later. Edward soon had his first MC and was recommended for a Victoria Cross. But when Rupert had tried to question him about it, for the vicarious glory of being able to impress other boys at school, Edward had said, ‘For peeing on a machine gun, old boy – to cool it down a bit. It got too hot and jammed,’ and looked embarrassed. ‘Under fire?’ Yes, Edward had admitted that there had been quite a bit of firing. Then he changed the subject. By the time he was twenty-one he was a major with a bar to his MC, and Hugh was a captain and had won his cross and been wounded. When they had finally come home from the war neither of them talked about it; with Hugh, Rupert had felt that it was because he couldn’t bear to, whereas with Edward, it seemed more that he’d done with all that and was only interested in what was going to happen to him next – joining the firm and marrying Villy. But Hugh had never been the same. His head wound had left him with bad headaches, he’d lost a hand, his digestion wasn’t good and he sometimes had rotten dreams. But it wasn’t only that: Rupert had noticed, and he still noticed, that there was something about his expression, about his eyes, a haunted look of outrage, anguish, even. If you called his name and he looked at you straight – like Edward, like his mother – you caught this expression before it dissolved to the mildness of anxiety and thence to his habitual affectionate sweetness. He loved his family, never sought company outside it, never looked at another woman, and had particular affection for all children, particularly babies. It was when he looked at, or thought about, Hugh that Rupert felt irrational pangs of guilt that he had not shared the unknown hell.

The Schubert came to an end and Sybil, without raising her eyes from her sewing, said, ‘Bed, darling?’

‘If you’re ready.’ He put the record away, walked over to his mother and kissed her. She patted his cheek.

‘Sleep well, darling.’

‘I’ll sleep like a log. Always do, here.’ As he walked over to his wife, he gave Rupert a little smile and then, as though to snap any sentiment, winked. Rupert winked back: it was one of their old habits.

There was a general folding up of work and movement for bed. Rupert looked at Zoë, completely engrossed; he had never known her so caught by a book before.

‘Can I interest you in bed?’

She looked up. ‘Is it that late?’

‘Getting on. It must be a marvellous book.’

‘It’s quite good. All about the civil war in America,’ she added, as she marked her place. Villy’s lip curled and she met Sybil’s eye fleetingly. She had discussed the book with Sybil when it came out earlier in the year, having borrowed it from Hermione; she had glanced at it, she said, and it seemed to her that the heroine had a mind as shallow as a soup bowl, thinking of nothing but men, frocks and money. Sybil had suggested that the bits about the civil war were supposed to be rather good, and Villy, who had not glanced at those bits, said that they seemed to her to play a very minor part. Sybil had said that it didn’t sound her kind of book. Sybil had handed her sewing to Hugh to hold, had swung her legs over the side of the sofa, but could not rise unaided, and Rupert went to help her. Villy decided to go to bed also, and to be asleep before Edward had finished his game.

‘Where’s Rachel?’ someone asked, and the Duchy, putting her steel-rimmed spectacles into their needleworked case, answered, ‘She went to bed early, had rather a head.’

In fact, Rachel had gone to the Brig’s study after dinner to telephone Sid with whom she had a delightful – and extravagant – conversation lasting six minutes, about the arrangements for Sid to come down to lunch. Monday had been fixed as a good day, as most of the family would be going to the beach. ‘Won’t they want all the cars, then?’ S had said. But Rachel didn’t think so, and if they did, she would bicycle to Battle to meet the train. Sid had been enchanted by the idea of Rachel on a bicycle, and had been difficult to cut short, but, after all, it was her parents’ telephone, though when she said this, Sid simply replied, ‘Yes, my angel,’ and went on talking. That was why it had been six minutes instead of the statutory three that was thought proper in the family for a long-distance call. After it, and, of course, unable to share her excitement and joy with the family, Rachel had decided to read in bed and have an early night, and meeting Eileen with the coffee tray in the hall, had asked her to tell Mrs Cazalet that she had a headache and would not be down again. But on her way up she thought she would look in on the girls and be sure that Clary was settling in. Louise and Polly were in their beds – Louise was reading, Polly was knitting – and Clary lay on her stomach on the floor writing in an exercise book. They were all flatteringly pleased to see her. ‘Sit on my bed, Aunt Rach. I’m reading a frightfully sad book – it’s full of God and people bursting into tears. It’s in Canada with a nasty aunt in it. Not at all like you,’ she added. Rachel sat on Louise’s bed. ‘And what’s Polly making?’

‘A jersey. For Mum. For Christmas. It was for her birthday but it’s a secret so it’s very hard to knit it for long. Don’t tell her.’

‘It looks very difficult.’ It did: some lacy pale pink stitch with bobbles on it. ‘It’s a good thing that it’s called dirty pink,’ said Polly. ‘It’s got far less pink than when I started.’

‘Dirty pink was in last year,’ said Louise. ‘By the time you’ve finished it, it’ll be terrifically out. But as your mother’s not very fashionable, she probably won’t mind.’

‘People wear colours that suit them any time,’ said Polly.

‘People with auburn hair are supposed to wear green all the time. And blue.’

‘What an authority you are upon fashion, Louise.’ She needed a mild snub. She turned to Clary, who had been writing steadily. ‘And what are you up to?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘What are you writing? A journal?’

‘Just a book.’

‘How exciting! What’s it about?’

‘Nothing much. It’s the life story of a cat who can understand everything in English. He was born in Australia but he’s come to England for some adventures.’

‘Quarantine,’ said Louise. ‘He couldn’t.’

‘How do you mean he couldn’t? He just has.’

‘He’d have to spend six months in quarantine.’

‘I expect you could put that in, and then have him in England,’ said Polly kindly.

Clary shut her book and got into her bed without another word.

‘She’s sulking now.’

Rachel was distressed.

‘You’re being very unpleasant, Louise.’

‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘That’s not good enough. You can’t say unpleasant things and then pretend you didn’t mean them.’

‘No, you can’t,’ said Polly. ‘It just makes your character worse in the long run. What it is is that you wish you’d thought of writing a book.’

This shaft went home, Rachel noticed. Louise blushed and then she told Clary she was sorry, and Clary said all right.

Rachel kissed them all in turn: they all smelled sweetly of damp hair, toothpaste and Vinolia soap. Clary hugged her and whispered that she had a surprise to show in the morning. Louise apologised again in a whisper; Polly just giggled and said she had nothing worth whispering.

‘Be nice to one another and lights out in ten minutes.’

‘How arbitrary!’ she heard Louise exclaim after she had left. ‘How too, too arbitrary! If she’d said half past nine or ten, I could understand it, but just ten minutes after whenever she leaves …’ The small grudge would unite them, anyway.

On Monday, Hugh left Sybil in bed, ate a hurried breakfast with the Duchy, who had risen early for the purpose, and left the house by seven thirty for London. He didn’t think that Sybil should go to the beach and begged his mother to dissuade her. The Duchy agreed; the day promised to be a scorcher, there were plenty of uncles and aunts to look after Polly and Simon, and sitting on hot pebbles in blazing sun when you were unable to bathe (which, of course, was out of the question for Sybil in her condition) was agreed to be unsuitable. Hugh, who resisted an impulse to say goodbye to his wife after breakfast – not wishing to wake her again – felt relief. Sybil, lying in bed and longing for him to come up, listened to his car starting, got out of bed in time to see it disappearing down the drive. She was thoroughly awake by now, and decided to have a long, luxurious bath before anybody else wanted the bathroom.

It was after ten before they were ready to go. They went in three cars, crammed with towels, bathing suits, picnic baskets, rugs and whatever personal equipment each one thought necessary for their pleasure. The younger children had buckets and spades and a shrimping net, ‘Which is very silly, Neville, because there’s not a single shrimp there.’ The nurses took knitting and Nursery World, Edward his camera. Zoë took Gone With The Wind, her new halter-necked bathing costume – navy blue with white piqué bows at neck and back of waist – and some dark glasses; Rupert took a sketch pad and some charcoal; Clary took a biscuit tin for collecting shells or anything; Simon and Teddy took two packs of cards – they had recently learned bezique; Louise took The Wide Wide World and a jar of Wonder Cream (it wasn’t lasting well – had gone all watery at the bottom with a kind of greenish scum on top, but she felt it had to be used up), and Polly took her Brownie box camera – her best present from her last birthday.

Villy took a book about Nijinsky and his wife in a beach bag that also contained a jar of Pomade Divine and Elastoplast and a spare bathing costume – she hated sitting about in a wet one. Edward, Villy and Rupert were to drive the cars, which were slowly crammed with occupants, who, by the time they got moving, were already sticky and, in some cases, tearful from the heat and the conviction that they had been put in the wrong car.

Mrs Cripps watched them go from her kitchen window. Apart from all the cooked breakfasts, she had been hard at it since seven o’clock, making sandwiches with hard-boiled eggs, sardines, cheese and her own potted ham, with seed cake and flapjacks and bananas for pudding. There was now time for a nice cup of tea before Madam came with her orders.

For reasons she did not wish to define, Rachel found it difficult to inform the Duchy of her arrangements. She decided against asking for the car; the bicycle – in spite of the heat – would leave her much freer. However, when the Duchy came upon her at breakfast and asked her, she felt bound to divulge them, saying that she and Sid would enjoy lunch at the Gateway Tea Rooms, but the Duchy, who regarded meals in hotels or restaurants, or even tea rooms, as an absurd waste of money as well as being an unbecoming practice, insisted that she bring Sid back for lunch and had rung the bell for Eileen to tell Tonbridge to have the car round in half an hour before Rachel could protest at all. We can go for a walk after lunch, she thought. It will be just as good, really. Nearly as good. She had been deflected from any argument by Sybil, who limped into the morning room, apologising for being late, and sank into a chair with evident relief. She had lost her balance getting out of the bath, she explained; she seemed to have twisted her ankle. Rachel, who had been a VAD in the last years of the war, insisted on seeing it. It was badly swollen and was clearly extremely painful. The Duchy fetched witch hazel and Rachel procured a crêpe bandage and some lint, and the ankle was bound up.

‘You really ought to keep it up,’ Rachel said, and moved a second chair in front of Sybil, carefully putting the bruised foot on a cushion. This meant Sybil was sitting at an angle that was not at all comfortable and, almost at once, her back started to ache. It had taken her ages to dress because of her ankle and she felt tired already – at the beginning of the day. Rachel left to go to Battle, and the Duchy, having poured some tea and ordered Sybil some fresh toast, repaired to the kitchen to see Mrs Cripps. When Eileen appeared with the toast, Sybil asked her for a cushion for her back, and while this was being fetched she looked at the morning paper that had been left open at the foreign news page. Someone called Pastor Niemoller had been arrested after a large service in a place called Dahlem – she had never heard of it. She decided that she didn’t want to read the paper, and actually she didn’t want to eat anything either. She leant forward for Eileen to put the cushion behind her and, as she did so, felt as though a hand was slowly gripping her spine in the small of her back. She scarcely had time to notice this before the grip loosened and was completely gone. How odd, she began to think, and then without warning she was sucked into a whirlpool of paralysing, mindless panic. That, too, receded and little fragments of coherent fear reached the surface of her mind. Polly and Simon had been late – Polly eleven days and Simon three. She was between three and four weeks before her time, the fall couldn’t have hurt it – or them – Hugh would be in London by now, the fall had been a shock, that’s all it was … Ridiculous! She began to assess her body for reassurance. She was sweating, it was pricking under her arms, and when she touched her forehead it was damp. Her back – that was all right now, nothing except the mild ache that came when she was in the wrong position or stayed in one for too long.

She moved her foot, and was almost relieved by the sudden twinge of pain. Ankles could be agony, but that was all it was. Her mouth was dry, and she drank some tea. It was simply bad luck, when she’d planned to go for a little walk in the garden that she hadn’t seen properly this year. She imagined herself walking barefoot on the well-kept lawn, cool still from dew, and soft and springy: she really wanted to walk about now. The frustration made her feel irritably restless – what was Eileen doing hanging about—

‘Are you all right, Mrs Hugh?’

‘Quite all right. I twisted my ankle, that’s all.’

‘Oh, that’s what it is.’ Eileen seemed reassured. ‘Ever so painful, that can be.’ She picked up her tray. ‘You’ll ring if you want anything, won’t you, madam?’ She leant over the table and moved the little brass bell within Sybil’s reach. Then she went.

Perhaps I ought to be in London, not to be so far away, thought Sybil. I could have gone back with Hugh – got a taxi from the office. She really couldn’t go on sitting like this, it was too uncomfortable. She would like to ring up Hugh and see what he thought, but it would only worry him so she wouldn’t do that. If she got up and got one of the walking sticks out of the Brig’s study – only across the passage – she could then go into the garden. It might be quite possible to walk if she had a stick. She turned and heaved her leg off the chair; her ankle responded with such a stab of agony that her eyes filled with tears. Perhaps she had better ring for Eileen to get it … but then she became aware of the hand on her spine again, not painful, but menacing, with the promise of pain. She remembered it now. It was the mere beginning – the grip would become a vice, and then a knife that would slowly surge downwards, cleaving her spine and stopping seconds after it became intolerable, then apparently vanish but, in reality, lie in wait for another, more murderous assault … She must get up – get to – Supporting herself by the table, she rose to her feet, then remembered the bell – now out of reach – and as she leant over the table to get it, felt the warm flood of her waters breaking. It’s gone all wrong! she thought, as tears began to stream down her face, but she reached the bell and rang it and rang it for ever for someone to come.

Which they did, of course, much sooner than it felt to Sybil. They sat her back in the chair, and the Duchy sent Eileen for either Wren or McAlpine, whoever could be found first, while she telephoned Dr Carr. He was out on his rounds, but could be reached, they said, and would come at once. She did not tell her daughter-in-law that he was out, said calmly that he was on his way, and that Eileen and one of the men would carry her up to her room, and that she, the Duchy, would not leave her until the doctor came. ‘And everything will be all right,’ she said, with all the reassurance she could muster, but she was afraid, and wished that Rachel was there. Rachel was always wonderful when things were difficult. It was not good that the waters had broken so soon; she could see no sign of blood, and did not want to alarm Sybil by asking about it. If only Rachel was here, she thought almost angrily; she who is always here would be away at a time like this. Sybil was biting her lips trying neither to scream nor to cry. The Duchy took one of her hands in both of hers and held it hard; she remembered that it was good to be grasped so and she upheld the conspiracy of silence in childbirth that was naturally proper for women like themselves. Pain was to be endured and forgotten, but it was never really forgotten, and looking at Sybil’s mute distress she could remember it too well. ‘There, there, my duck,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a lovely baby – you’ll see.’

Rachel would have liked more time to get ready to meet Sid. She would also have liked them to be able to have lunch at the White Hart alone together, but she would not have dreamed of going against the Duchy’s wishes in that matter, or, indeed, any other – a state of affairs that had applied all her life. There had, twenty years ago, been the excuse that she was too young – eighteen, in fact. The young man in question had urged her to greater freedom, but really, of course, she had not wanted to be in the least bit free with him. As she grew older, the reason for her obedience became her parents’ age rather than her own, and the notion that at thirty-eight she could still not order her own time to suit herself, or in this case, her and Sid, did not seriously impinge. It was a pity, but to dwell upon one’s own wishes would be morbid, a Cazalet term that implied the uttermost condemnation.

So she sat in the back of the car and looked on the bright side. It was a beautiful hot, shimmering day, and she and Sid would have a perfectly lovely walk after luncheon together – might even take some Osborne biscuits and a Thermos with them and thus legitimately skip family tea.

Tonbridge drove at his usual twenty-eight miles an hour, and she longed to ask him to go faster, but he had never been known to be late for a train and asking him to hurry would look ridiculous.

In fact, they were early as she had already known they would be. She would wait on the platform, she told Tonbridge, who then mentioned that he had something to collect from Till’s for McAlpine.

‘Do that now, and we’ll meet you outside Till’s,’ Rachel ordered, pleased to have recognised the opportunity in time.

The station was very quiet. The one porter was watering the station flower beds: scarlet geraniums, dark blue lobelia and white alyssum, remnants of the decorative fervour inspired by the Coronation. There was one passenger with a child on the far side waiting to go to Hastings for a day at the sea, judging by the bucket and wooden spade and picnic bulging from a carrier bag. Rachel walked over the bridge to where they sat, then decided that she didn’t want to get involved with anyone – wanted to meet Sid in silence – but she was glad when the train puffed slowly towards them as she felt she was being unfriendly. Then it stopped and doors flapped open and there were people and then there was Sid walking towards her smiling, wearing her brown tussore suit with the belted jacket, bareheaded, cropped hair and a nut-brown face.

‘What ho!’ said Sid, and they embraced.

‘I’ll carry it.’

‘You will not.’ Sid picked up the businesslike little case which she had relinquished to greet Rachel, and tucked Rachel’s arm in her own.

‘I imagined you bicycling to meet me, but I suppose the bridge defeated you. You look tired, darling. Are you?’

‘No. And I didn’t bicycle. I’m afraid we’ve got Tonbridge and lunch at home.’

‘Ah!’

‘But a lovely walk afterwards, and I thought we’d take tea with us so we wouldn’t have to come back for it.’

‘That sounds a splendid idea.’ It was resolutely said, and Rachel glanced at her in search of irony, but there was none. Sid met her eye, winked and said, ‘Bless you, my angel, for always wanting everybody to be happy. I meant it. It is a splendid idea.’

They walked out of the station in a silence that for Rachel was blissfully companionable, for Sid so full of wild happiness that she was unable to speak. But, eventually, as they passed the Abbey gates, she said, ‘If we take a picnic, won’t the children want to come too?’

‘They’re all at the beach. They won’t be back until tea-time.’

‘Ah! The plot thins, in the most admirable manner.’

‘And I thought you might stay the night. There’s a camp bed we could put in my room.’

‘Is there really, darling? I must wait for the Duchy to ask me, though.’

‘She will. She’s very fond of you. It’s a pity you haven’t brought your fiddle. But you could borrow Edward’s. You know she loves playing sonatas with you. How’s Evie?’

‘I can tell you about that in the car.’ Evie was Sid’s sister, renowned for minor and often wilful ill health. She did part-time secretarial work for a well-known musician and relied upon Sid, with whom she lived, to manage their slender resources and to look after her whenever she needed or felt like it.

And so, in the car, with Sid holding her hand, Rachel asked about Evie, and was told about her hay fever, the possibility of an ulcer, although the doctor didn’t think it was that, and her plan that Sid should take her away for a seaside holiday some time in August, and preserving the proprieties in the presence of Tonbridge had a certain charm, making them both want to laugh because in a way it was so silly – they didn’t really want to talk about Evie in the least. They looked at each other or, rather, Sid would glance at Rachel and be unable to look away, and Rachel would find herself transfixed by those small, brownish, eloquent, wide-apart eyes, and would feel herself beginning to blush when Sid would chuckle and produce some idiotic cliché such as ‘every silver lining has a cloud’, in the voice she would use for reading a motto from a cracker, adding ‘or so they say,’ which broke the tension until the next time. Tonbridge, driving slightly faster – he was looking forward to his dinner – couldn’t make head nor tail of what they were on about.

They no sooner drew up beside the gate that led to the front door when Eileen, who had been watching for them, ran out and said that Madam said that Miss Rachel was to go up to Mrs Hugh’s room immediately as the baby had started and the doctor hadn’t yet arrived. Rachel sprang out of the car without a backward glance and ran into the house. Oh, Lord! thought Sid. Poor darling! She meant Rachel.

Sybil sat in bed, propped up by pillows; she refused to lie properly, which the Duchy felt was wrong but she was far too anxious and alarmed to try to insist. Rachel would do it, and here at last was Rachel. ‘The doctor is coming,’ said the Duchy quickly and gave Rachel a little frown meaning don’t ask when. ‘If you will stay with her, I’ll see to towels. The maids are boiling water,’ and she went, glad to do something she could accomplish. She had been beginning to find Sybil’s pains more than she could bear. Rachel drew up a chair and sat beside Sybil.

‘Darling. What can I do to help?’ Sybil gasped and threw herself forward with clenched hands, pressing on the bed each side of her thighs. ‘Nothing. I don’t know.’ A bit later, she said, ‘Help me – undress. Quick – before the next one.’ So in between the pains Rachel helped her out of her smock, her slip and her knickers, and finally into a nightdress. This took a long time as with each pain they had to stop, and Sybil gripped Rachel’s hand until she thought her bones would break.

‘Supposing it’s born before he comes?’ Sybil said, and Rachel knew that she was terrified by the thought.

‘We’ll manage. It’s going to be all right,’ she soothed, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said, stroking Sybil’s hair back from her forehead. ‘I used to be a VAD. Remember?’

And Sybil seemed comforted by that, gave Rachel a small trusting smile and said, ‘I’d forgotten. Of course you were.’ She lay back for a moment and shut her eyes. ‘Could you tie my hair back? Out of the way?’ But by the time Rachel had found the strip of chiffon indicated upon the dressing table Sybil was again racked, her hand searching blindly for Rachel’s hand.

‘Oh, God – let the doctor come,’ Rachel prayed as Sybil uttered a moan.

‘Sorry about that. It’s all a bit Mary Webbish, isn’t it? Straining at bedposts and all that?’ And as Rachel smiled at the gallant small joke, she added, ‘It does hurt rather.’

‘I know it does, darling. You’re tremendously brave.’

Then they both heard a car, which surely must be the doctor, and Rachel went to the window. ‘He’s come!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that good?’ But Sybil had crammed her fist into her mouth and was biting her knuckles not to scream and seemed not to hear her.

He was an old man, an elderly Scot with gingery brindled hair and moustache. He came into the room taking off his jacket and putting down his case and was rolling up his shirt-sleeves as he talked.

‘Well, well, Mrs Cazalet, so I hear you had a wee fall in the bath this morning and your baby’s decided to make its way out.’ He looked around the room, saw the jug and basin and proceeded to wash his hands. ‘No, I can manage quite well with cold, but we’ll be needing some hot water. Perhaps you would arrange that, Miss Cazalet, while I examine the patient?’

‘But I’ll need you back in five minutes,’ he called, as Rachel left the room.

On the landing, she found the housemaids with covered pails of hot water, and a pile of towels laid on the linen chest. Downstairs she found the Duchy with Sid. Her mother was deeply agitated. ‘Rachel! I feel I must ring Hugh.’

‘Of course you must.’

‘But Sybil begged me not to. She doesn’t want him worried. It seems wrong to do exactly what she doesn’t want.’

Rachel looked at Sid, who was looking at the Duchy with a kind of protective kindness that made Rachel love her. Now, Sid said, ‘I don’t think that’s the point. I think Hugh would mind very much if he hadn’t been told what was going on.’

The Duchy said gratefully, ‘Of course you are right. Sensible Sid! I’m so glad you are here. I’ll do it at once.’

When she had gone, Sid held out her battered silver case and said, ‘Have a gasper. You look as though you need one.’

And Rachel, who usually smoked Egyptian cigarettes, finding Gold Flake too strong, took one, and found her hand was shaking as Sid lit it for her. ‘It is ghastly,’ she said. ‘The most ghastly pain. I didn’t realise. Has the doctor got a nurse coming?’

‘Apparently not at once, anyway. He tried his usual midwife and she was out on a case, and the district nurse said she couldn’t come until some time in the afternoon. He’s told me what to do. I’m sorry about our day.’

‘It can’t be helped.’

‘Have you been asked to stay?’

‘I have. The plan is that Mrs Cripps should make a picnic tea and I should deflect the beach party – keep the children out of the way until it’s over. It’s curious, isn’t it?’ She added after a pause, ‘How for the most important events in people’s lives everybody has to keep out of the way, know nothing about it.’

‘Oh, but, they might hear her. Not that Sybil would make a sound if she could possibly help it.’

‘Exactly.’

Sensing Sid’s faintly ironical expression, Rachel was conscious of the fleeting but familiar sensation of Sid’s foreignness – at least, that was how she put it to herself. Sid’s mother had been a Portuguese Jewess whom her father had met on tour with the orchestra in which he played. He had married and fathered two daughters, Margot and Evie, and then abandoned them, gone to Australia; he was always referred to – rather bitterly – as Mr Sidney of that ilk. They had had a hard, impoverished life, their mother eventually dying of TB and homesickness (her family cut her off at her marriage). It was difficult, Sid said, to know which had been worse. But all this, and the fact of her coming from a family of musicians, made her seem foreign and this in turn seemed to make her keener on confronting things than Rachel’s family had ever been. ‘I’ve seen nothing but spades since I was a baby,’ Sid once said. ‘How am I call them anything else?’ As soon as her mother was dead, Margot had abandoned the name she had always loathed and called herself Sid. Like many couples whose cultural backgrounds are very different, they both had ambivalent attitudes in their behaviour to one another: Sid, who recognised that Rachel had all her life been overprotected from either financial or emotional reality, wished to be the person who protected her most, and at the same time could not resist the occasional dig at the middle-class Englishness of it all; Rachel, who knew Sid had not only had to fend for herself, but really for her mother and sister as well, respected her independence and authority but wanted Sid to understand that the understatements, discretion, and withholding were an integral part of the Cazalet family life, existing only to uphold affection and good manners. ‘I can understand,’ Sid had once said during an early confrontation, ‘but I can do that perfectly well without agreeing. Don’t you see?’ But Rachel did not see at all; for her, understanding meant tacit agreement.

To each of them some of these thoughts had recurred, but there was no time for any of that now. Rachel stubbed out her cigarette and said, ‘I must go back. Would you ask the Duchy to get one of the maids to bring me an apron?’

‘Of course I will. God bless. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.’

‘I will.’

I have only to do exactly what he tells me, she thought, as she went upstairs, and it’s utterly ridiculous to mind about blood so much. I must simply think of something else.

Cooden really wasn’t the best beach for the children, Villy thought, as she shifted her bottom on the boulderish pebbles and tried to find a more comfortable bit of break-water for her back. Even on such a calm and blazing day, the sea was surprisingly cold – a steely blue far out, but near them an aquamarine swell that heaved endlessly in and broke upon the steeply shelving shore in a creamy fringe that swooned and melted to green again and was sucked out beneath the next wave. The boys were all right, they were good at swimming from school, but the girls were afraid of going out of their depth, hobbled over the pebbles, waded a few steps, swam two or three strokes again and again, until she made them come in, teeth chattering, cold and slippery as fishes, to have their backs rubbed, to be given pieces of Terry’s bitter chocolate or hot Bovril. There were no rock pools for Lydia and Neville, and almost no sand; Lydia got swept off her feet by the undertow and wept bitterly for ages in spite of Villy’s soothing. Neville, who had watched it all with horror, announced that he was not going to use the sea today at all, ‘Except for water for my bucket.’ ‘Then you won’t get any chocolate,’ Clary had said and was at once told to mind her own business by Ellen, who was pinning a handkerchief with safety pins to Neville’s Panama hat so that a square of white covered his already pink bony shoulders. Ellen and Nanny sat in their hats, grey cardigans and sensible belted cotton dresses, their legs stretched out in front of them in thick pale cotton stockings with black double-strap shoes, their knitting on their laps. A day at the beach must be purgatory for them, Villy thought. Neither would have dreamed of bathing: their authority with the children was shaky, undermined by the presence of parents, but at the same time they were responsible – for Lydia and Neville not catching cold or getting a touch of the sun, or going off with strange children from whom they might catch something.

Now Nanny, who had begun to dress Lydia, was forestalled by Edward, who said he would take her out on his shoulders as Rupert was going to do with Neville (neither liked the idea of their offspring being afraid of the water). ‘Tell the boys to come in when you do,’ Villy called; it would be a point of honour with them not to come in until they were made to. She looked across at Zoë, who had curled herself up against the breakwater on a car rug and was rubbing some cream on her legs – which was the only part of her in the sun – rather a common thing to do in public, Villy thought, then felt ashamed. Whatever the poor girl does, I’m horrid about it. Rupert had tried to make her bathe, but she wouldn’t, said she knew it would be too cold. She had never let any of the Cazalets know that she couldn’t swim.

Villy watched as Edward and Rupert picked their way out into the sea with Lydia and Neville clinging to their backs like nervous little crabs. When they began to swim, Lydia screamed with excitement and Neville with fear, their screams mingling with the sea cries of other children, afraid of waves, not wanting to come in, shocked by the cold, afraid of being splashed by the swimmers. The fathers went on swimming until Rupert was in danger of being strangled by Neville and had to come in. Neville’s hat had blown off and Villy watched as Simon and Teddy raced to retrieve it, like little otters.

The girls, clad now in their shorts and Aertex shirts, were starting to ask about lunch. Polly and Clary were collecting smooth, flat pebbles and putting them into Clary’s biscuit tin, and Louise lay flat on her stomach, apparently untroubled by the stony beach, reading and wiping her eyes with a bath towel.

‘How soon?’ one of them said.

‘As soon as the others come in and get changed.’ He waved to Edward who was carrying Lydia now and shouting to the boys.

Lydia returned triumphant and very cold; Edward dumped her beside Villy, against whom she leant, pigtails dripping, teeth rattling.

‘I swam much further than you did,’ she called to Neville.

‘You’re freezing, darling.’ Villy wrapped her in a towel.

‘I’m not. I’m boiling really. I’m making my teeth chatter. This is how Nan dresses in the morning. Look!’ She held the towel around her, turned her back and made humping movements of someone wriggling into stays, a fine imitation of clumsy decorum. Edward caught Villy’s eye and they both managed not to laugh.

Teddy and Simon came in quickly enough the moment that Edward shouted, ‘Lunch!’ They came rushing in from the sea, running easily over the pebbles, their hair plastered to their heads, the straps of their bathing dresses dropping over their shoulders. A super bathe, they said; they hadn’t wanted to come in; there was no point in changing as they were going back immediately after lunch. Oh, no, they weren’t, said Edward. They had to digest their lunch first. People got cramp and drowned if they bathed immediately after a meal.

‘Have you known anyone who actually drowned, Dad?’ Teddy asked.

‘Dozens. You get changed. Chop chop.’

‘What does chop mean?’ asked Lydia nervously.

‘It’s Chinese for quick,’ said Louise. ‘Mummy, can we start unpacking lunch? Just to see what there is?’

Zoë helped unpack the picnic, and the nannies stopped combing hair and clucking over tar on Lydia’s bathing dress and spread a rug for the children to sit on. Zoë was pleased because Rupert had knelt beside her and ruffled her hair and asked how was his little bookworm, which made her feel interesting in a different way. The children ate ravenously, except Lydia refused her hard-boiled egg, which she described as dead. I never eat dead eggs,’ she said, so Teddy ate it for her. Neville spilled his orange squash on the car rug and Clary got stung by a bee and cried until Rupert sucked out the sting and explained how much worse it was for the bee who, he said, would be dead as a doornail by now. After lunch, Lydia and Neville were made to have rests in the shade of the breakwater by the nannies, the grown-ups smoked and the older children played a rather shaky game of Pelmanism on the pebbles with the cards they had brought. Clary was the best at that by far, never seeming to forget a card, although, as Simon pointed out, some of them got tilted by the pebbles and continued to be visible if you cheated, which he seemed to feel might be the case with Clary. Then the boys wanted to bathe again, claimed that they had been promised a second go. The tide was going out, and the others decided to paddle – not possible when they had arrived. Goodness! thought Zoë. It goes on and on. She had got to the bit in Gone With The Wind where Melanie was starting to have her baby and Scarlett couldn’t get the doctor to come, and decided she didn’t want to read that now. Rupert was walking with Clary along the beach hand in hand, Clary looking up at him and swinging his arm. Perhaps if I got better with his children, he wouldn’t want any more, she thought. This seemed a good, but difficult, idea. She imagined herself nursing Neville with pneumonia or something fatal of that kind; sitting up with him night after night, stroking his forehead and refusing to leave his side for an instant, until he was pronounced out of danger. ‘He owes his life to you, darling,’ Rupert would say, ‘and I owe you more than I can ever repay.’ She felt she was rather like Scarlett: beautiful, brave and quite straightforward about things. She would make Rupert read the book and he would see.

By four o’clock everybody was ready to go home – although the children would not admit it. ‘Must we? We’ve hardly been here a minute.’ Banana skins, egg shells, the crusts of sandwiches, the Bakelite mugs were packed away, personal belongings lost and found and established with their owner, keys mislaid and discovered. They began the tramp back up the beach and along the dirt track to the cars that, parked in the sun, were now like furnaces. Villy and Rupert and Edward wound down the windows but the seats were burning and Neville said he could not sit on them and had to be placed on Ellen’s lap. Edward drove their Buick, and Villy the Brig’s old Vauxhall, which had a villainous gearbox having been driven by countless non-owners and, in any case, being pretty old. Rupert took Zoë and Ellen in his Ford with Neville and Lydia who clamoured to go with Neville as they had begun to play I Spy. Clary was glad to go with Villy and the girls; Nan went in Edward’s car in front, which she relished, and the boys at the back. They drove in tandem with Villy leading in case her car broke down. The girls quarrelled about who should sit in front, Louise saying she was the oldest and Clary saying she was sick in the back. Villy settled for Clary. She had a headache from the sun and began to look forward to a tepid bath and sitting on the lawn sewing with Sybil. ‘But it is good for them to get some bathing and sea air,’ she told herself.

Rachel returned to the bedroom to find that Dr Carr had mysteriously converted it from a scene of amateur emergency into a place where something serious was happening with a predictable outcome. Sybil now lay on her side, with her knees drawn up, and he was putting a cold compress on her ankle.

‘Mrs Cazalet is doing very well indeed,’ he announced, ‘over half-way dilated, and the baby is the right way round. We’ll need some towels to put under her, and you might send for the kitchen scales, and then you can rub her back – here – low, down each side of the spine when the pains come and tell her to breathe. The more you have the pain, Mrs Cazalet, the deeper you breathe. Is there a wee table I can have for my paraphernalia, Miss Cazalet? Is there a bell in this room? Ah! Well, then, we can make our demands. Breathe, Mrs Cazalet, try to relax and breathe.’

‘Yes,’ Sybil said. She did not look nearly so frightened now, Rachel saw, kept her eyes on the doctor with a look of trustful obedience that amounted almost to adoration.

The towels were spread, a table was covered with a clean cloth and forceps, scissors, and a bottle with gauze pads beside it were duly arranged. Peggy brought up the scales, announcing with awe that Mrs Cripps had cleaned them herself, and was told to change the pails of hot water every twenty minutes to ensure that they would be hot enough when required. All this induced a sense of order and purpose, but when everything was arranged there was order, but the purpose seemed to recede. Rachel, who knew she knew nothing, began to wonder how long it was to take. Surely, if one had had babies before, it was supposed to be quicker? But quicker than what? After an unknown but very long amount of time, Dr Carr examined Sybil again, ‘No need to leave the room, Miss Cazalet,’ and when he had finished, straightened up with a little grunt and said that it would be some time yet and that he needed to telephone his wife to tell her to tell his partner to be ready to take evening surgery. Rachel told him where the telephone was and then resumed her seat beside Sybil who lay still upon her back. Her eyes were closed, and this, with her hair – dark at the roots from sweat – scraped back from her forehead, gave her a graven appearance. She opened her eyes, smiled at Rachel and said, ‘Polly took ages, but Simon was quite quick. He won’t be long, will he?’

‘The baby?’

‘The doctor. Oh, here it comes.’ But it was not the baby, simply another pain. She heaved herself onto her side so that Rachel could rub her back.

The Duchy had done everything that she could think of. She had rung Hugh as calmly as possible and suggested that he go home and collect the baby’s clothes to bring down with him. Yes, they had got a doctor. Dr Carr was well known for his delivery of babies. And Rachel was helping, everything was fine. She had visited the kitchen again to find that Mrs Cripps had put everybody to work. The maids were making sandwiches and laying a small tray of cold meat and salad for lunch; Dottie was staggering to and fro with large enamel jugs to fill the huge pan and kettle on the range and Mrs Cripps herself, her greenish face luminous with energy and sweat, was rubbing furiously at the weighing cradle of the kitchen scales, while Billy had been told to bring in fresh hods of coal with which to stoke the range. A state of grim excitement prevailed. Mrs Cripps had earlier announced that ladies were chancy in confinement and she shouldn’t be surprised whatever became of Mrs Hugh, whereupon Dottie burst into theatrical tears and had to be slapped by one of the maids to give her, as Mrs Cripps observed, something to cry for. When the Duchy came in, everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at her as the bearer of tidings of whatever sort.

‘Mrs Hugh is doing well, and the doctor is here. Mr Hugh will be coming down this evening. Miss Sidney and I will lunch in the morning room, but we shan’t want very much. I see you are all very busy so I won’t disturb you. I don’t think the beach party will be back much before four, Mrs Cripps, but we should have the hampers ready for them when they come.’

‘Yes, m’m. And would you like lunch served now, m’m?’

The Duchy looked at her watch strapped to her wrist in which a thin lace handkerchief was tucked.

‘One thirty, thank you, Mrs Cripps.’

Leaving the kitchen, she paused in the hall, wondering whether she should go and see whether Rachel was managing, whether she wanted anything. Then she remembered that Sid was stranded with nothing to entertain her, so she provided Sid with The Times and a glass of sherry, said that luncheon was on its way, and that she would be back in a tick. She had become desperately worried about what the poor baby was to wear when it was born. Hugh was very unlikely to arrive with its clothes in time, and meanwhile it needed warmth. In her bedroom, which was all white muslin and pale blue washed walls, she searched for and found the white cashmere shawl that Will had brought back for her from one of his trips to India. It had become cream-coloured with age and washing, but it was still as soft and light as feathers. It would do. She hung it on the banister rail outside Sybil’s room. Then she went downstairs for luncheon.

In spite of being told several times by his mother that everything was fine, and that he was not to worry, Hugh was, of course, worried. It’s the possibility of twins, he thought as he drove back to Bedford Gardens. Twins might mean complications and he did not like to think of Sybil without her own doctor and midwife. If only it had happened yesterday, he thought, or, better still, in three weeks’ time when it was supposed to happen. Poor pet! She must have been overdoing it; we shouldn’t have gone to that concert, but she’d seemed so keen on it. When he’d gone into the Old Man’s room to tell him, his father had smiled and said, ‘Well, I’m damned!’ but he’d seemed quite cool about it, and when Hugh said that he was going down at once, after calling briefly at home, the Old Man grunted and said, ‘Women’s business. Much better keep out of the way till it’s over, my boy.’

Then he shot a keen glance at his eldest son – unpredictably nervous now since that bloody war – and said that of course Hugh must go if he thought it right. He’d be down in the evening, he added, by his usual train.

Bedford Gardens was delightfully quiet: most people were away with their children. He parked his car, walked up the path and let himself into the house. As he slammed the door, he heard a sound upstairs, of someone running across the room – their bedroom. He put his hat on the hall table and was about to go upstairs, when Inge appeared at the top of them. She was heavily made up and wearing what he recognised at once as the pink silk dress that Sybil had bought last year for a wedding. She stared at him as though he was an intruder until he was constrained to say, ‘It’s me, Inge.’

‘I not thought you back till night-time.’

‘Well, Mrs Cazalet’s started the baby, and I’ve come back for its clothes.’

‘They are in nursery,’ she said, and vanished up the stairs. When he reached the bedroom floor the door was shut, and he guessed she was in their room feverishly tidying up. He had immediately decided to pretend he didn’t recognise the dress: he couldn’t sack her now or he’d have to stay until she left, and that would hold him up. He went on up to the nursery, seething in rage, saw the clothes all laid in a basket; he found a suitcase and tipped them in and shut the case again. The bedroom door was still closed. He went on down to the drawing room and remembered that he wanted his camera to take pictures of Sybil and the child. His desk, at one end of the room, was in total disarray as though it had been plundered: drawer open, paper all over the place. What the hell! He’d have to sack her.

It was bad enough that she should dress up in Sybil’s clothes and use her make-up, although he didn’t think Sybil had that much make-up, but rifling his desk – was she after money or something? She was behaving like a common thief or burglar, or, the thought struck him unpleasantly, a spy of some sort, although God knew there was nothing worth spying on. This was ridiculous. No, it wasn’t entirely – she was German, wasn’t she? He’d never liked her and couldn’t leave her alone in the house now; she might do something like decamp with everything of value she could carry, set fire to the place, anything. He put the camera beside the suitcase, and went back upstairs.

It took him precisely an hour. She had all Sybil’s clothes strewn about the room, her shoes, her jewellery – everything. He told her to get dressed in her own things, pack and leave. She must be out of the house in half an hour and, first of all, she was to give him the keys. She stuck out her bottom lip and swore under her breath in German, but she didn’t argue. He waited outside the room until she had changed into her own cotton frock and then waited in the bedroom while she was upstairs packing. It reeked of Sybil’s scent, Tweed, that he always gave her on her birthday. He attempted to tidy the room, hang a few things back in the wardrobe, but it was all such a mess he despaired. His heart was pounding with anger, and a headache was starting – all he needed for the long drive. ‘Hurry up!’ he shouted up the stairs. She seemed to be a long time, but eventually appeared carrying two obviously immensely heavy cases. ‘The keys,’ he said. She looked at him with pure hatred and thrust them painfully into his hand.

Then quite slowly, and with horrible accuracy, she spat on him. ‘Schweinhund!’ she said.

He stared back at her pale protracted eyes that were full of cold malice. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. The hatred he felt for her frightened him. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out before I call the police.’ He followed her down, watched her open the door and slam it with ferocity behind her.

He went into the bathroom and washed his face and hand, laving them again and again in cold water. Then he took a couple of his pills, and then he thought he’d better be sure that the house was properly locked up. It wasn’t. The back door from the kitchen was ajar. After that he went round the basement and ground floor making sure that every window was secure. Then he remembered Pompey, but when he eventually found the poor cat he was on Polly’s bed and he was dead – strangled with Polly’s winter dressing-gown cord. Polly’s beloved cat, the creature she loved most in the world. It was too much. He sat on his daughter’s bed and put his face in his hands. For a few seconds he sobbed until some early upbringing message told him that this would not do, so he stopped and blew his nose. He looked at Pompey, who lay rigidly stretched out, the cord still strained round his neck. His half-open eyes were still bright; his fur was warm. When he undid the cord, he saw that it had been expertly knotted. It struck him then that strangling a cat without a sound was not an easy thing to do, unless you had practice – the thought caused a shiver of revulsion. But he had to get on. He wrapped Pompey in a bath towel and carried him downstairs, with the notion that he would bury him in the back garden, but one look at the baking soil covered with iris roots changed his mind. He would take Pompey to Sussex, find the right time to tell Polly and help her to bury him – the Duchy would provide a good spot for a grave. He must, in any case, tell Polly that Pompey had died, but not how. She must never know how cruelly malevolent people could be – let her have the pure grief. I’ll get her another cat, he thought, as he packed the car, putting Pompey in the back of the boot. I’ll get her twenty cats – any cat she wants in the world.

‘I always thought that Adila’s sister was so much better than Adila. She was quieter – less flamboyant.’

Sid, although she did not agree with the remark – that is to say that she had not the distaste for flamboyance that was so evident in the Duchy – was none the less pleased that the subject of violinists was proving to be the right distraction for her. They had progressed from a profound and mutual admiration for Szigeti and Hubermann to the D’Aranyi sisters. Now, she said that they were wonderful together, set each other off, were perfect with Bach, for instance. The Duchy’s eyes glowed with interest.

‘Did you hear that? They must have been marvellous.’

‘Not at the concert. At a friend’s house one evening. They suddenly decided to do it. It was unforgettable.’

‘But I don’t think Jelly should ever have performed that Schumann. He clearly did not want it performed, and it seems wrong to have gone against his wishes.’

‘Hard to resist, though, if you had uncovered the manuscript.’

Sensing dangerous ground – the Duchy would never have considered that something hard to resist was a reason for resisting it – she added, ‘Of course, Somervell wrote his concerto for Adila which is one reason why she has been heard far more often in public than her sister. Those Brahms Hungarian dances for encores! Marvellous, don’t you think? Number five, for instance.’

Sid agreed – nobody could play a Hungarian dance like a Hungarian.

The Duchy patted her mouth with her napkin and rolled it into its silver holder. ‘Have you heard this new young boy – Menuhin?’

‘I went to his first concert at the Albert Hall. He played the Elgar. An amazing performance.’

‘I never felt it was right that there should be these child prodigies. It must be awfully hard on them – no real childhood and all the travelling.’

Sid thought of Mozart, and remained silent. Then the Duchy added, ‘But I have heard him and he is wonderful – such a grasp of the music and, of course, he is not a child any more. But isn’t it interesting? All the people we have mentioned, not to speak of Kreisler and Jourchim, are Jews! One has to hand it to them. They really are remarkable fiddlers!’ Then she looked at Sid and went slightly pink. ‘Dear Sid, I hope you don’t …’

And Sid, wearily used to the blanket anti-Semitism that seemed to envelop the English, answered with the practised good humour that she had needed to cultivate since she was a child, ‘Dear Duchy, they are! I wish I could say “we”, but I have no false notions about my talent – perhaps it is my gentile blood that has prevented me from getting to the top.’

‘I do not think that is important. The great thing is to enjoy it.’

And make some sort of living from it, thought Sid, but she did not say this.

The Duchy was still feeling unhappy about what she described to herself as her slip. ‘Dear Sid! We are so fond of you. Rachel is devoted to you, you know. You must stay a few days so that you can see more of each other. I do hope that you will have time for that.’

She put out her hand to Sid, who took it as though it was full of a handful of rich crumbs that she could not resist. ‘You are very kind, Duchy dear. I should love to stay a day or two.’

The Duchy’s frank and troubled eyes cleared and she gave Sid’s hand a little pat. ‘And perhaps we might play together – the amateur and the professional? Edward’s Gagliano is here.’

‘That would be lovely.’ Edward’s Gagliano was a darn sight better than her own fiddle. He never played it now; it lay in its case, still marked Cazalet Minor from his school days, and it was kept in the country.

The Duchy rang for Eileen to clear lunch and got up from the table.

‘I think perhaps I will see whether they want anything upstairs. Will you keep an ear out for the beach party returning?’

‘I will.’

When the Duchy had gone, she lit another cigarette and wandered outside to the basket chairs on the lawn. She could see the drive and the gate from there. The usual welter of ambivalent feelings was churning away inside her: offence rising at this frightful lumping of people into a category for reasons of race; a creeping, but irresistible gratitude for being classed as an exception to the rule – the mongrel’s view, she supposed, but she had other reasons for craving approval, if not affection, which neither the Duchy nor any of her family nor the people she worked with nor anyone at all, in fact, excepting possibly Evie would ever know anything about if she could help it – because of Rachel, her dear most precious and secret love. It had to be secret if she was to keep Rachel, and life without Rachel was not something she could bear to contemplate. Evie did not actually know, but she had some inkling and had already started to use her damnable intuition for manipulative purposes – like this deadly fortnight by the sea she said they must have. Evie always sensed the moment attention was not primarily on herself and depending on the occasion became more ingeniously demanding. And this occasion, the great occasion of her life, was dynamite. If only I were a man, she thought, none of this need be. But she did not want to be a man. Nothing is simple, she thought. Yes, one thing was: she loved Rachel with all her heart and nothing could be simpler than that.

Sybil lay with her legs apart and her knees up, the mound of her belly obscuring all but the top of Dr Carr’s head, pale pink and shiny, as he bent to see how things were going. For a long time they hadn’t been at all: the pains had gone on, but the cervix had not continued to dilate; she seemed stuck. Dr Carr was wonderfully reassuring, but she was so tired and sick of the pain that she wanted it to stop more than anything else, and for the past hour – hours – whatever it had been – there seemed to be no reason why it ever should. In the middle of this examination, another splitting surge of pain began – enormous, like a freak wave – and she tried to writhe away from it, but could not because Dr Carr was holding her legs.

‘Push, Mrs Cazalet – bear down – push now.’ Sybil pushed, but this increased the agony. She shook her head weakly and stopped, felt the pain ebbing, taking all her strength away with it. Sweat stung her eyes and then tears. She whimpered – it wasn’t fair to hold her down to make things worse when she was too tired to bear any more. She looked weakly for Rachel, but Dr Carr was talking to Rachel who was too far away. She felt stranded, abandoned by both of them.

‘You’re doing very well now, Mrs Cazalet. When the next pain starts, take a deep breath, and really push.’

She started to ask him if something was happening at last. ‘Yes, yes, your baby’s on its way, but you must help. Don’t fight the pains, ride them. Go with them, you’re nearly there.’ She did it twice more, and then, just before the third time, she felt the baby’s head, like a heavy round rock crammed in her, beginning to move again and she gave a cry not simply of pain but of excitement at her child coming to life out of her. And after that, the last two or three waves – although they seemed to be breaking her open with a new shriller agony – did not engulf her as before: her body’s attention was all focused upon the amazing sensation of the head moving down and out. She saw Rachel standing over her with a small white pad and shook her head – she did not want to lose track of this baby’s journey as had happened twice before with the others, and so she raised herself so that she could see its arrival. The doctor shook his head at Rachel, who put the pad away. Sybil let out a long sighing breath, and then the head was out – eyes tightly shut, wispy hair dark wet – the crumpled shoulders and then the rest of the tadpole body was lying on the bed. Dr Carr tied and cut the cord, picked up the baby by its ankles and slapped it gently on its slippery bloodstained back. The baby’s face screwed up as though in grief at leaving its watery element, and then its mouth opened and it expelled its first breath in a thin, wavering cry. ‘A beautiful boy,’ said Dr Carr. He was smiling. Sybil’s eyes were fixed upon his face with some mute appeal. He looked at her with tender kindness, almost as though they were lovers, and laid the baby in her arms. Rachel, watching Sybil’s face as she received this little bloodied creature – now crying fiercely – found herself in tears. The room was full of excitement and love.

Then Dr Carr became briskly practical. Rachel was told to put warm water in a basin to bathe the baby while he attended to the afterbirth. Rachel tied a towel round her waist and gingerly took the baby from Sybil. She was terrified of hurting him. Dr Carr saw this and said brusquely, ‘He’s not made of glass, he won’t break,’ took the baby from her and laid him on his back in the basin. ‘You support his head and sponge him down. Like so,’ and went back to Sybil.

The baby, who had stopped crying, lolled in the bath, his slaty eyes, now open, roving about the room, his fingers opening and closing into a fist, his knees turned out, his feet at right angles to his legs, a bubble of mucus coming out of one nostril. Dr Carr, who seemed to miss nothing, looked at him, then cleaned his nostrils with a twist of cotton wool. The baby frowned, arched his back so that all his tiny ribs showed, and cried again. His skin, the colour of the smallest pink shells, was as soft as a rose. He made slow random movements with an arm or a leg, and sometimes he seemed to look at Rachel, but his gaze was inscrutable. She sponged him carefully, even humbly: he looked at once so vulnerable and majestic.

‘You can take him out now and dry him, and then we’ll put him on the scales. Just over seven pounds, or I’m a Dutchman, but we need to be sure. There we go, Mrs Cazalet.’ The room was suddenly full of the smell of warm blood. It was a quarter to five.

Hugh did not reach Home Place until twenty minutes after his son was born. He had had a puncture and had had trouble getting the tyre off the car. He arrived to find the Duchy feeding Rachel with ham sandwiches and tea. Mrs Pearson, the midwife, had arrived and Dr Carr, after a quick cup, was back with his patient for the delivery of the second baby – there were twins, after all – but he did not expect that to take long. Rachel came with him to fetch the baby clothes from the car.

‘I should like to see Sybil. Do you think it would be all right if I went up?’ he said as they walked back into the house.

‘Darling Hugh, I don’t know. What do you usually do?’

‘Well, Sybil doesn’t like me to until everything’s all shipshape, but it hasn’t been like this before.’

‘Well, we’ve got to take the clothes up, anyway. Your son is making do with a cashmere shawl.’

‘Is he fine?’

‘He’s wonderful!’ she said so fervently, that he looked at her with a little smile, and said, ‘I didn’t know that aunts could be so épris.’

‘Well, I was there, as a matter of fact. Mrs Pearson couldn’t come at once so I sort of helped.’

‘Did she have a bad time?’

‘I don’t think it’s ever exactly a picnic. She was marvellous, very brave and good. Dr Carr said that the second one would be quite quick, he thought,’ she added hurriedly, in case she had said too much of the other thing.

‘Oh, good, you’re a brick, Rach. I wonder if they’d let me see her – just for a second.’

But when they got up to the room, Mrs Pearson came to the door, said something to Sybil, and then turned back to say that Mrs Cazalet sent her love but would rather see him later, and Hugh, sure that Mrs Pearson was needed by his wife, did not dare ask her to show him his son.

Sybil, in the throes again of excruciating labour, longed for Hugh, but it was out of the question to submit him to even a brief sight of her like this. She was stuck, and the first baby had torn her, and in spite of Dr Carr’s assurances, she felt as though this would go on for ever, or until her strength gave out. In fact, it all went on for another hour and a half, at the end of which time it was clear that this baby was not coming out by the head – would be a breech. Dr Carr had to use forceps to hold the baby’s legs together and by then, Sybil was glad to have the chloroform, and so this time she did not see the bruised and battered little creature that came out with the cord round its neck and could not be got to breathe. They kept her under for the afterbirth, washed and stitched her and then Dr Carr sat by her until she was conscious enough to be told that the baby was dead. She asked to see it and was shown. She looked at the tiny limp white body, and then reached out and touched its head. ‘A girl. Hugh will be so sad.’ A tear slipped down her face: she was too exhausted to cry.

There was a silence; then he said gently, ‘You have a beautiful son. Would you like your husband to come and see you both?’

Half an hour later, Dr Carr climbed wearily into his old Ford. He had been called out the previous night, had taken morning surgery and done five calls before delivering Mrs Cazalet, and he was not as young as he used to be. In spite of forty years’ experience, the birth of a baby still moved him and he had a rapport with women in labour that he never felt about them at any other time. It was rotten luck that the second baby had been stillborn, but at least she had the other one. My God he had tried with that second baby, though – she would never know how much. He’d pressed and released that wee chest minutes after he’d known it was hopeless. Mrs Pearson had wanted to wrap it up, put it away out of sight, but he’d known the mother would want to see it. When he’d gone downstairs, they’d given him a fine drop of whisky, and he’d warned Mr Cazalet that his wife was very tired and not to stay with her long; all she needed was a nice cup of tea and a sleep, no emotional scenes, he had wanted to add, but looking at the father’s face, he thought there wouldn’t be any of that. He looked a decent, understanding man – not like some of them who became breezy and facetious and often drunk. Now he must get back to Margaret. In the old days, he used to come home full of tales about deliveries, excited, even exalted by having witnessed the same old miracle. But after they lost both their sons in the war, she couldn’t stand to hear about any of that and he kept it to himself. She had become a shadow, acquiescent, passive, full of humdrum little remarks about the house and the weather and how hard he was on his clothes, and then he’d bought her a puppy, and she talked endlessly about that. It had become a fat, spoiled dog, and still she talked about it as though it were a puppy. It was all he could think to do for her, as his grief had never been allowed to be on par with hers. He kept that to himself as well. But when he was alone in the car like this, and with a drop of whisky inside him, he thought about Ian and Donald who were never spoken of at home, who would, he felt, be entirely forgotten except for his own memory and their names on the village monument.

‘I did ask her, and she just said, never you mind.’ Louise looked across the glade resentfully at her mother who was smoking and laughing and talking with Uncle Rupert and someone called Margot Sidney. She and Polly and Clary had withdrawn from the main picnic – over in any case for some time now – in order to have a serious discussion about exactly how people had babies but they weren’t getting anywhere. Clary had pulled up her shirt, fingered her navel doubtfully and suggested that it might be the place, but Polly, secretly horrified, had immediately said that it wasn’t big enough. ‘Babies are quite large, you know, about like a medium doll.’

‘It’s got all sorts of wrinkles in it. It might stretch.’

‘It would be much better if they just laid eggs.’

‘People are too heavy for eggs. They’d break them sitting, and it would be scrambled baby all over the place.’

‘You’re revolting, Clary. No. I’m afraid it must be –’ she leant over Polly and mouthed, ‘between the legs.’

‘No!’

‘It’s the only place left.’

‘Who’s revolting now?’

‘It’s not me. I didn’t plan it. It’s common sense,’ she added loftily, trying to get used to the ghastly idea.

‘It’s certainly common,’ said Clary.

‘I think,’ Polly said dreamily, ‘that really all they have is a sort of pip, quite large compared to a grapefruit; and the doctor puts it in a basin of warm water and it sort of explodes – like a Japanese flower in those shells – into a baby.’

‘You’re an absolute idiot. Why do you think they get so fat if all they have is a pip? Look at Aunt Syb. Can you honestly believe that all she has inside her is a pip?’

‘Also, it’s known to be dangerous,’ Clary said. She looked frightened.

‘It can’t be all that dangerous – look at all the people there are,’ Louise began, and then remembered Clary’s mother and said, ‘You might be right about the pip, Polly, I expect you are,’ and winked very largely at Polly to make her realise.

Soon after that, Aunt Rachel came and found them and told them that Aunt Sybil had had a baby boy, and a little girl who had died, and was terribly tired so would they all go home quietly and not make a noise? Simon, who was up a tree at the time, said, ‘Good show,’ and went on hanging from a branch by his knees and asking people to look, but Polly rushed to Aunt Rachel and said she wanted to go and see her mother and the baby at once. Everybody was glad to be going home.

Rachel and Sid slipped out at about six for a walk. They walked fast – almost furtively—round the drive to the gate into the wood in case any of the family saw them and suggested coming too. Once in the wood, they began to stroll along the narrow path through it that led to the fields beyond. Rachel was very tired; her back ached from leaning over Sybil’s bed, and the news of the stillborn baby had upset her very much. When they reached the stile into the meadow that slipped gently uphill before them, Sid proposed that they go only as far as the large single oak that stood by itself a few yards from the wood and sit for a bit, and Rachel gratefully agreed. Although, if I had suggested a five-mile walk, Sid thought, she would have agreed to that even though she is dead beat. The thought filled her with tender exasperation; Rachel’s unselfishness was formidable to her, and often made decisions a matter of strenuous perception.

Rachel arranged her back against the oak, accepted a gasper from Sid, who lit it for her with the little silver lighter that had been an early present on her first birthday after they had met, nearly two years ago. They smoked for a while in silence. Rachel’s eyes seemed fixed upon the green and golden meadow starred with poppies and oxeye daisies and buttercups, but not as though she saw these things, and Sid watched Rachel’s face. Her fine complexion was pale and drawn, her blue eyes clouded, smudged above her high cheekbones with fatigue, her mouth trembling, making small movements of compression and resolution as though she was afraid of crying. Sid reached out and took one of her hands. ‘Easier if you tell,’ she said.

‘It seems so cruel! All that agony and effort and then that poor little thing born dead! Such ghastly, frightful bad luck!’

‘There is one baby, though. That’s a great deal better than if there had only been one in the first place.’

‘Of course it is. But do you think it will always miss its twin? Aren’t they specially devoted?’

‘Only if they’re identical, I believe.’

‘Yes, that’s right, I’d forgotten. The awful thing is that I can’t help being glad I wasn’t there for the second part. I should have blubbed.’

‘Darling, you weren’t, and if you had been you probably wouldn’t have blubbed out of consideration for Sybil, but if you had it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, you know. Crying isn’t a crime.’

‘No, but it’s unsuitable when you get to be my age.’

‘Is it?’

Looking at Sid’s tender, ironical expression, Rachel said slowly, ‘Well, we were brought up to think that part of growing up was learning not to cry at things. Except music and being patriotic and things like that.’

‘Elgar would be a hole-in-one, you mean?’

This made Rachel laugh. ‘Dead right. I wonder what the Cazalets did for tears before Elgar!’

‘We don’t have to consider the Dark Ages of the Cazalets.’

‘We do not.’ She took the little white handkerchief from her wrist and wiped her eyes. ‘How absurd one is!’

Then they began to talk about themselves. Rachel asked about the seaside holiday that Evie wanted to go on, and Sid said how much she did not want to go, leaving out only the fact that it was going to be very difficult to afford – Rachel’s affluence and Sid’s lack of it embarrassed them both – and Rachel said did she feel she had to go because Evie really needed it, in which case, why not go to Hastings, and then they could both come to Home Place for lunch, etc. But Sid said that she was afraid of Evie finding out about them – her and Rachel.

‘But, darling, there’s nothing really for her to find out!’

This was both true and untrue, Sid knew. She said. ‘Well, she’s a very jealous person. Possessive.’

‘You are all she has in the world. I think that’s understandable.’

She makes me all she has in the world, Sid thought, but did not say so. Like many people who criticised and urged others to be more open, she preserved thickets of secrecy for herself. In this case, she called it loyalty to Evie; Rachel, incapable of manipulative practices, would not in the least understand them in anyone else. Then Rachel sighed with contentment, and said, ‘It is so lovely that you’re here now,’ with such heartfelt affection, that Sid was able to put her arms round her and kiss her for the first time that day, an exquisite but different pleasure for each of them.

Hugh, although he hoped he had concealed it, had been shocked by the sight of Sybil. She lay under a clean sheet flat on her back with her hair loose on the square white pillow and beside all this white her face had a grey, waxy appearance and her eyes were closed. He thought she looked as though she was dying but Mrs Pearson, who had answered the door, said cheerfully, ‘Here’s your husband to see you, Mrs Cazalet,’ as though nothing very much was the matter. ‘I’ll just pop down and see to some tea for her,’ she added and rustled out.

Hugh sought a chair, and drew it up to the bed.

Her eyes had opened when she heard Mrs Pearson, and now she looked at him without expression. He took her hand and kissed it; she frowned slightly, shut her eyes again, and two tears rolled slowly out. ‘Sorry. It was twins. I slipped. Sorry.’ She made some small movement in the bed and flinched.

‘Darling girl, it’s all right.’

‘No! He tried to make her breathe. She never breathed. All that and she never lived.’

‘I know, darling. But what about the lovely boy? May I see him?’

‘He’s over there.’

As Hugh gazed at the profile of his son, lying on his side and sternly asleep, she said, ‘He’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with him!’ Then she added, ‘But I know you wanted a daughter.’

He came back to her. ‘He looks marvellous. And I have a very nice daughter.’

‘She was so much smaller! So tiny – pitiful. When I touched her, her head was still warm. No one will ever have known her – but me. Do you know what I wanted?’

‘No.’ He found it difficult to speak.

‘I wanted her back inside me – to keep her safe.’ She looked at him with streaming eyes. ‘I really wanted that.’

‘I want to take you in my arms,’ he said, ‘but it’s difficult when you’re flat on your back.’ Then, unable to stop himself, he gave one dry sob, and held her hand to his face.

At once, she raised herself and was holding him. ‘It’s all right. I wanted you to know, but not to – don’t be sad! It isn’t as though – when he wakes, you’ll see how beautiful he is – you mustn’t be sad – remember Polly – darling …’ And as she held him, comforting him about her own grief, he began to recognise the extent of it and his pity for her was dissolved by her love. He took her in his arms and laid her carefully back on the pillow, smoothing her hair, softly kissing her mouth, telling her that she was right, that they had Polly, and that he loved her and his new son. When Mrs Pearson came back with the tea they were holding hands.

Hearing that Polly and Simon were going to see their new brother, who had been put in his basket in Hugh’s dressing room for the purpose, the other children clamoured to be allowed to go, too. Afterwards, when Villy went to say goodnight to Lydia she overheard her and Neville discussing the baby.

‘I simply didn’t like him,’ Neville was saying. I can’t see why anyone would like him.’

‘He did look a bit – red and wrinkly – like a tiny old person.’

‘If he starts like that, what do you think he’ll turn into?’

‘I tremble to think.’

‘You tremble to think,’ he scoffed. ‘I don’t tremble. I just think he’s horrible. I’d rather have a Labrador than him—’

‘Neville! After all, he is a human bean.’

‘He may be. He may not.’

At this point, Villy, straightening her face, interrupted them.

After Polly had seen her new brother, Hugh said that he wanted to talk to her.

‘Now?’ She had planned to play Monopoly with Louise and Clary.

‘Yes.’

‘Here?’

‘I thought we’d take a turn in the garden.’

‘All right, Dad. I must just tell the others. I’ll meet you in the hall in five secs.’

He took her to the seat by the tennis court and they both sat on it. There was a short silence, and Polly began to feel anxious.

‘What is it, Dad?’ His face was looking very craggy which it did when he was tired. ‘Nothing bad?’

‘Well, it is, rather.’

She caught the sleeve of his coat. ‘It’s nothing about Mummy, is it? You wouldn’t let me see her! She’s – perfectly – all right, isn’t she?’

‘No, no,’ he said, stricken by her face. ‘No. Mummy is simply very, very tired. She went to sleep and I didn’t want us to wake her. You’ll see her in the morning. No, it’s—’ and then he told his carefully prepared tale. How he had had to go home to collect the baby’s things, and how, coming down from the nursery floor, he had seen Pompey lying on the bed and had gone to give him a stroke, and found that he was dead – had obviously just quietly died in his sleep, which was terribly sad, but from his point of view was the best way for a cat to die. ‘He wouldn’t have known anything, Poll – just gone to sleep and not woken up. Which is,’ he said, looking at her earnestly, ‘of course, much worse for you than for him.’

‘Which is, of course, the best way round,’ she said. She had gone white, and her mouth was trembling. ‘How simply awful for you! To just go in and find him like that! Poor Dad!’ She threw her arms around him, weeping bitterly. ‘Oh, poor Pompey to be dead! He wasn’t awfully old – why would he die like that? Do you think he thought I wasn’t coming back, and—’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t that. And we don’t know how old he was. He was probably much older than he looked.’ He had been acquired in a carrier bag from Selfridge’s – a present from her godmother, Rachel, for her ninth birthday. ‘He was grown up when you got him.’

‘Yes. It must have been a frightful horrible shock for you.’

‘It was. Want a hanky?’

She took it, and blew her nose twice. ‘He must have used up his nine lives. Dad! You didn’t – just throw him away, did you?’

‘Good Lord, no! As a matter of fact, I brought him down here. I thought you might like to give him a proper funeral.’

She shot him a look of such radiant gratitude, that his heart lurched. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I might quite like to do that.’

On their way back to the house, they discussed Pompey’s remarkable life – or lives: run over three times, marooned at the top of a tree for two days until the fire brigade got him down, shut in the wine cellar for nobody knew how long … ‘But that’s only five of them,’ Polly said sadly.

‘He probably used some of them up before you knew him.’

‘That must be it.’

As they neared the house, she said, ‘Dad! I’ve been thinking. It might not mean that he had nine lives as the same cat; it might mean that he’s simply going to be nine different cats. Well, eight more.’

‘It might. Well,’ he finished, ‘if you come across a kitten who looks as though he might be Pompey having another life, let me know, and I’ll get him for you.’

‘Oh, Dad, would you? I’ll keep a strict look out.’

That was the beginning of that summer, which merged in many of their minds with other summers, but was remembered chiefly as the summer that young William was born, and there was that sad matter of the other baby; but remembered by Polly as the summer that Pompey died and his splendid funeral; remembered by old William Cazalet as the summer he clinched the deal over buying the Mill Farm down the road; remembered by Edward as the summer when, offering to stand in for Hugh at the office, he met Diana for the first time; remembered by Louise as the summer she got the Curse; remembered by Teddy as the summer when he shot his first rabbit and his voice started going funny; remembered by Lydia as the summer she got locked in the fruit cage by the boys who forgot her, went off to play bicycle hockey and then to lunch and nobody found her until half-way through lunch (it was Nan’s day off) and she’d worked out that when gooseberries were over, she’d die of nothing to eat; remembered by Sid as the summer when she finally understood that Rachel would never leave her parents, but that she, Sid, could never leave Rachel; remembered by Neville as the time his loose tooth came out when he was on his fairy cycle which he could only dismount by running into something so he swallowed the tooth and didn’t dare tell anyone, but waited in terror for it to bite him inside; remembered by Rupert as the summer when he realised that in marrying Zoë he had lost the chance of being a serious painter, would have to stick to school-mastering to provide her even with what she thought of as the bare necessities; remembered by Villy as the summer when she got so bored that she started to teach herself to play the violin and made a scale model of the Cutty Sark which was too large to put into a bottle, something she had done with a smaller ship the previous summer; remembered by Simon as the holidays Dad taught him to drive, up and down the drive in the Buick; remembered by Zoë as the frightful summer when she was three weeks late and thought that she was pregnant; remembered by the Duchy as the summer that the tree paeony first flowered; remembered by Clary as the summer she broke her arm falling off Joey when Louise was giving her a riding lesson and when she sleepwalked into the dining room when they were all having dinner and she thought it was a dream and Dad picked her up and carried her to bed; remembered by Rachel as the summer she actually saw a baby being born, but also the summer when her back really started to go wrong, was only intermittently right for the rest of her life. And remembered by Will, whose first summer it was, not at all.