Four

THE WIVES

December 1946 – January 1947

‘How was your Christmas? Really?’

‘Oh, darling! I don’t know where to begin.’

Jessica had come to tea, which had been taken with Miss Milliment, and therefore Christmas had been discussed with the stock cheerfulness that said nothing about emotional undercurrents. Jessica had described Nora’s Christmas tree with a present for every inmate, and how Father Lancing had brought some of his choir to sing carols, and how she, Jessica, had made four dozen mince pies that had been consumed on this single occasion, and how the pipes had frozen just before the holiday began, and burst just in time for Christmas Eve. Villy had told Jessica about cooking her first Christmas dinner (Miss Milliment had said how good it had been), and how the children had played Racing Demon all over the drawing-room floor and Lydia had accused Bernadine of cheating and Teddy had got very angry. ‘And I made a Christmas cake that was like a bomb shelter,’ she had said.

Now, Miss Milliment had tactfully retired to her room: Lydia and Roland were out having a Christmas treat with Rachel, and she had Jessica to herself. The room was reasonably warm since, although there was practically no coal to be had, Cazalets’ sent a lorryload of off-cuts, and the sisters sat each side of the log fire, Jessica lying on the sofa with her elegant shoes off and she, Villy, in the only comfortable armchair.

Seeing Jessica lying there, looking so well groomed in her beige and green tweed suit with a jumper exactly matching the green, their mother’s pearls round her neck and her newly set hair, she felt a pang of resentment. How the tables had turned! Now it was she whose hands were rough with kitchen work, who never seemed to have time to get her hair done, whose clothes each day were chosen for their suitability for housework and keeping warm. It was she who had Miss Milliment to look after, had young children unused to London, who had to be fed and entertained and looked after, and worse, she was having to do this all on her own, whereas Jessica, with her neat little Chelsea house, had a daily maid and a husband.

‘I don’t think I can begin to convey to you how awful it was,’ she said, and instantly, as she had known that she would, Jessica started upon a flurry of flimsy silver linings. ‘It must be nice to have Teddy home,’ she said.

‘Of course I’m glad he’s back. But I’m worried about him. Edward’ (she pronounced his name with a new, bitter clarity) ‘doesn’t pay him enough. He has the most awful struggle to make ends meet. And Bernadine – I have them to supper once a week – told me that that woman has a housekeeper, a daily woman and someone to look after her child! Something of a contrast to here.’

‘Well, darling, you did choose this house—’

‘When I thought I was going to live in it with my husband!’ There was a short silence, and when she had lit a cigarette, she said, ‘And he’s bought her a new car!’

‘He did give you one, didn’t he? The Vauxhall?’

‘It’s hardly the same, is it? I need one. She has someone to chauffeur her around.’ She smiled then, to show that however awful everything was, she could take it.

Wanting to give her something to smile at, Jessica said, ‘Judy says Lydia is tremendously popular at school. She said she was wonderful as Feste. Such a pretty voice. How pleased Daddy would have been.’

‘Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?’ For a moment they were amiably united by nostalgic affection. ‘But I expect Mummy would have been simply shocked at her playing a member of the opposite sex. Which would knock out Shakespeare completely for any girls’ school.’

‘Oh, it didn’t,’ Jessica said. ‘They simply cut out the rude bits and most of the then wear sort of robes anyway. I don’t think Shakespeare counted when it came to decorum – even with Mummy.’

‘How’s Judy?’

Jessica sighed. ‘Going through a difficult phase. She argues with Raymond, which he doesn’t like at all, and she somehow seems too big for the house. She’s always knocking things over and shouting when one can hear her perfectly well if she simply speaks. I think sixteen is almost the worst age.’

‘And Angela?’

‘Good news. She’s having a baby.’

‘Darling, how nice for you!’

‘If only she wasn’t thousands of miles away, it would be. I want to go over, of course, when it’s born, but Raymond won’t let me go by myself, and he hates the idea of the voyage. I must say I sometimes almost envy you being free to make your own decisions.’ Looking at her sister’s face, she retreated from this notion. ‘Of course I know it’s awful, darling, I really do. But Raymond doesn’t like to let me out of his sight, and honestly I do find it claustrophobic. He doesn’t like parties, or concerts, or any fun, really. All he wants to do is sit in that coach house he’s converting, grumbling about what Nora has done to his house, and bullying the builders.’

There was a silence during which Villy looked at Jessica and thought how astonishingly insensitive she really was. It was all part of what she now had to endure – passing sympathy of the kind one might proffer to someone who had mislaid something, and then reams of stuff about the petty inconveniences of her life.

‘How is Louise? Isn’t it about time—?’

‘She hardly comes near me. I think I told you that she was in cahoots with her father about the whole wretched business behind my back – he talked to her before me – and when I did see her she admitted that she’d met that woman, actually had dinner with them, so it’s quite clear to me which side she’s on.’

‘Have you seen him?’

She sensed sympathy. ‘Not since some time before Christmas. He asked me to lunch because he wanted me to divorce him.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘I don’t know. Why should I? I don’t want a divorce.’

When Jessica didn’t reply, she said, ‘You think I should?’

‘Well, it does sound as though you’re in rather a strong position. I mean, if he wants it and you don’t. You might get him to make rather more generous provision for you in return for agreeing.’

‘I’m not interested in money!’

‘Darling, if you don’t mind me saying so, that’s because you’ve always had enough of it. I haven’t, as you know, and it’s made me realize that being unhappy with not enough money is infinitely worse than being unhappy with more. That’s all I meant.’

She was trying to help. She was wrong, of course, but she meant well. ‘I’ll think about it,’ Villy said, to close the subject. ‘That’s a very pretty suit. Did you get it from Hermione?’

‘Yes. She’s got some very nice tweeds. And it’s bliss not to have to stick any more to the utility thing. I always loathed those frightfully short skirts. You should go and look.’

Villy offered a drink, and Jessica said one would be lovely, and then she must go. For the rest of her visit, they stuck to safe subjects … Christopher, who had spent Christmas with Nora to help, seemed to have become rather religious, and Father Lancing, who was very High Church, had taken rather a fancy to him, or he to Father Lancing – at any rate, Christopher was always doing things for the parish, running errands and so forth, ‘although I think that was partly to get away from Raymond’, she finished. Roland was having lessons with Miss Milliment, but of course next autumn he would really have to go to school, Villy said, although she was not going to send him away. Miss Milliment, apart from being a little deaf, was much the same, although her sight did seem to be worse. Jessica divulged the fact that Raymond and Richard had got rather drunk together on New Year’s Eve and that Nora had been outraged. ‘But for once I think Raymond was right, and it was good for poor Richard to have a little fun.’ Then she had added that it was rather awful to think that getting drunk with Raymond constituted fun, and they had both laughed.

They had become friends again. She felt quite sorry when Jessica left.

Armed with her own clothes coupons and some that the Duchy had given her at Christmas, she did go and see Hermione. She decided to ring up first to be sure that Hermione would be there. She was, and immediately asked her to lunch. She left lunch for Miss Milliment and the children, and promised to be back in time for tea. Lydia had protested, ‘Honestly, Mummy, it’s terrifically boring having lunch with nobody of my age,’ but she was placated by being allowed to make a cake. ‘Only you’ll have to use dried eggs.’

It was a raw, cold January day; there had been a heavy frost and the sky was dense with what looked like snow; there was ice on the lake in Regent’s Park and the grass was white with rime. People waiting for buses in Baker Street looked pinched with cold; it was even cold in the car, and Villy was glad when she reached the cosy shop in Curzon Street. Hermione, as usual, made her feel both distinguished and welcome. ‘How too, too lovely that you were able to come! And it’s so lucky because my divine chestnut has gone lame so no hunting this week. Miss MacDonald! Look who’s here!’ and Miss MacDonald, wearing the jacket that matched her pinstriped flannel skirt, appeared from the depth of the shop, and smiled and said how nice it was to see her.

‘I’m sure Miss MacDonald could rustle up a cup of coffee – in fact, we’d both like some, if you’d be an angel.’ Miss MacDonald smiled again and disappeared.

‘What’s happened to your neck?’

‘I broke it last week. Rory and I rather misjudged the most enormous hedge that turned out to have a horrid ditch on the other side of it. We both came down, but our respective vets have said the damage is superficial. Rory has to rest and I have to wear this horrid collar. Sit down, darling, and let’s consider what you would like to see.’

Villy sat on the fat little sofa, newly upholstered in grey damask, while Hermione lowered herself stiffly on to a chair. ‘I don’t need party clothes. There aren’t any parties these days.’ She looked up from getting a cigarette out of her bag and met Hermione’s shrewd, cool gaze. ‘I’m not being sorry for myself,’ she said. ‘It’s simply a matter of fact.’

‘I always think the English concept of best clothes that are hardly ever worn is one of the chief reasons why they look so dowdy. One should wear one’s best clothes all the time. I think what you need is a really ravishing tweed suit, and perhaps a cosy woollen dress that will lend itself to some of your beautiful jewellery. But we’ll see.’ They saw for about two hours, at the end of which she had acquired a suit of charcoal and cream tweed with charcoal velvet trimming, a dress in fine facecloth the colour of black currants with long sleeves and a high neck, and a short coat in black doeskin lined with artificial fur. Of course, she had looked at, and tried on, many other things – including, at Hermione’s insistence, a long straight evening skirt of black crêpe with a multi-coloured figured-velvet jacket. ‘It is lovely, but I’d never wear it,’ she said, and realized that for the past two hours she had not, until now, remembered her altered state.

Hermione took her to the Berkeley, where they had a secluded corner table with the head waiter behaving as though Hermione lunching there had filled his cup. When they had settled for hot consommé and a casserole of grouse, Hermione said, ‘Now we’re out of Miss MacDonald’s earshot, I really want to know how you are and what is going on. Are you knee-deep in lawyers?’

‘No. Edward’s lawyer wrote to me once about money, but that’s all. Why?’

‘Divorces usually have lawyers attached to them. I imagined you were divorcing him.’

‘I don’t know. He wants me to.’

‘That’s not a good reason. I think it should be entirely for your sake.’

‘Why?’

‘Darling, he has behaved abominably. Unless, of course, he has recognized this and wants to change his mind …’

‘Oh, no. He’s set up with her now. They have a household.’ She heard, and disliked, the bitterness in her own voice. ‘Oh, Hermione, I find it so hideous! I can’t stop thinking about it. To know that he’s in London, a few miles away, getting up and making plans with her at breakfast – he must drive almost past the end of my road going back to her in the evenings, and his taking her out, going to his club with her so that all the members can see her – they’ve even been to dinner with people who used to be our friends – and then going back to their house and their bedroom—’ She could not go on: her imagination by no means stopped there, but she was ashamed of the disgusting thoughts that so easily took possession of her, night after night, and so frequently rendered her sleepless until they had run their revolting course. Not here! Not in this restaurant, in broad daylight, with Hermione opposite her. She picked up her glass of water and sipped it while she tried to think of something pretty and harmless. ‘It’s all been such a shock,’ she finished lamely, because she had said this so many times before. Daffodils, she thought, that cliché-ridden poem of Wordsworth’s that Daddy used to love so much. But it was too late. Looking at Hermione’s attentive, carefully expressionless face, she felt exposed.

‘It is vile for you … I can’t help feeling that you need to be entirely shot of him so that you can do something else with your life.’

‘But what could I do? I’m years past dancing, even if I’d been doing it all my life. I gave all that up for Edward.’

‘You might teach – children, perhaps. More and more little girls seem to want to do ballet.’

‘I don’t think anyone would have me. I’m fearfully rusty.’

‘You don’t know that.’

For the rest of lunch it seemed to her that every time she explained – with a practical reason – why she would not be able to do something, Hermione simply presented her with something else, until she felt hedged in by possibilities.

As they got back to the shop to collect her new clothes, she said, ‘I suppose one of the reasons why I don’t want to divorce Edward is that it would mean I was giving in, just doing what he wants and becoming nobody in the process.’

To which Hermione in her light, rather amused drawl, answered, ‘I don’t think you would. I’m divorced, after all – have been for ages when it was far less acceptable, and I am not a nobody. Never have been.’

‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry! Of course you aren’t but I’m not glamorous and entertaining and all the things you are.’

‘Oh, my dear! What an abject refugee! And here is Miss MacDonald with your sackcloth and ashes.’

She drove home full of the conversation at lunch. Of course, it had not changed her mind but it had provided food for thought. She felt uncertain, excited and fearful: the future branched out before her with more prongs to it than she had been envisaging. Perhaps she could start a small ballet class? This had nothing to do with a divorce: she could not see why Hermione had connected the two things. Perhaps she would talk to Sid, who taught at a girls’ school and might have ideas about how one set about getting teaching work.

But when she got home it was to a strong smell of burning cake – and freezing cold, since Lydia had opened all the windows to get the smoke out, she explained. She found Miss Milliment on her knees before the sitting-room fireplace, trying to clear out the grate – the fire had gone out – in order to re-lay and light it. Oh, Lord! she thought. How could I ever think of doing anything? ‘I leave you for a few hours and look what happens!’ she scolded. ‘All those cake materials wasted, and the kitchen looks as though you’ve been cooking for about two days, Lydia! And why did you let the fire go out? You were in here, weren’t you?’ She was helping Miss Milliment to her feet as she spoke.

‘I fear it was my fault,’ Miss Milliment was saying. ‘I fell asleep over the crossword after lunch and did not keep an eye on everybody as I should have.’

‘You shouldn’t have had to. Lydia is quite old enough to have dealt with things.’

‘It was Roland who burnt the cake,’ Lydia said. ‘He turned the gas up to make it cook quicker. I could have told him how stupid that was.’

‘And don’t tell tales. Will you never learn not to do that?’

‘I think at my age it’s too late now for me to learn that kind of thing.’

‘It was my fault, Mummy. I’m really sorry. We were playing Racing Demon and we forgot the cake. And I’m afraid I fused the lights upstairs because I was doing my experiment and there was a bang. Sorry, Mum. I’ll do the fire for you.’ He stumped on to the tiled fireplace and there was a scrunching sound that turned out to be Miss Milliment’s spectacles, which had fallen off when she was being hauled to her feet.

‘Have you got another pair, Miss Milliment?’

‘I believe I have still the ones that I had before I left London. They are in my father’s old case, as they were his frames. Somewhere. I cannot quite recollect where.’

Hours later, Villy had mended the fuse, got the fire going, shut the windows – it had begun to snow – set Lydia to clearing up the kitchen and Roland to help her with the washing-up, spent ages searching through Miss Milliment’s battered and capacious luggage for the spare spectacles, which proved almost useless when they were found, made tea for everyone with toast and potted meat instead of the cake, cleaned the oven and got more wood from the shed in the garden, sent Roland up to have his bath before supper and had another confrontation with Lydia about the state of her bedroom, which resulted in Lydia bursting into tears and then coming to her and saying that she had rung up Polly, who had invited her to supper and she was jolly well going. As this meant one bus down Abbey Road and Baker Street, she allowed it on the understanding that Lydia came back in a taxi for which she gave her money. Lydia went off, white-faced and sulking, and Villy felt miserable about it. As she had been coming downstairs from Roland she had overheard Lydia on the telephone saying, ‘… it’s horrible here’, and the phrase, and her daughter’s voice saying it, kept repeating in her head. After all her efforts it was horrible!

Roland said he didn’t want any supper, and proved to have a temperature. He couldn’t have caught cold already – must have been cooking up some ailment before that. She settled him down with an aspirin and a hot drink, and then began to make supper for herself and Miss Milliment who, it was clear to her, could hardly see at all. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow morning to the optician,’ she said, ‘and we’ll have two pairs of glasses made.’ She made herself an extremely strong gin before dinner. It meant that she was going to run out of it before the grocer would let her have another bottle, but she was so tired and dispirited, she didn’t care. She gave Miss Milliment her sherry, but the glass got knocked over before she had had more than one sip of it. ‘Oh, my dear Viola, what must you think of me?’

‘It’s quite all right, only I’m afraid there’s only a drop left.’

She went to the kitchen to get it. It would probably take a week for the new glasses to be made and she realized that everything about Miss Milliment’s life would be a hazard until they were. I shall be more pinned to the house than usual, she thought, as she put the potatoes on to boil, scorching her finger with the match. ‘Oh! Damn!’ The sudden pain brought tears to her eyes.

When she had given Miss Milliment what remained of the sherry, she topped up her gin without thinking. ‘The other half’, Edward had always called the statutory second drink. But no sooner had she settled herself upon the sofa than unmistakably she heard Roland crying. ‘I don’t think he’s very well,’ she said, and then, as she was pounding upstairs, realized that Miss Milliment had not heard him and therefore hadn’t understood what she had said.

He was sitting up in bed, crying. When he saw her, he cried, ‘Oh, Mummy! I want you to be with me!’

She sat on his bed and put her arms round him. He was hot and his hair was damp with sweat. ‘Darling! How do you feel?’

‘Crumbly.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I feel like a weak old biscuit. Hot and crumbly.’

‘Biscuits aren’t hot,’ she said, stroking his head. His ears stuck out in spite of Ellen taping them back when he’d been a baby, and with his feverishly bright eyes and the widow’s peak of his hair that grew, like hers, just off centre, he looked like a small monkey. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘A cold drink. There’s toast in my bed scratching me.’

She picked him up and put him in a chair wrapped in an eiderdown with a thermometer in his mouth while she tidied his bed which, apart from undeniable crumbs of something, contained his two bears, a dismantled torch, his favourite tin tip-up lorry and some sticking plaster that had come off his knee. ‘You’ve got so many things in your bed, no wonder it’s not comfy. Now. Let’s see.’ His temperature was a hundred and one, in spite of the aspirin.

He began crying again. ‘I don’t want you to go!’

‘I won’t be a minute, my darling. Let’s put you back in your nice tidy bed, with Tedward and Grizzly.’

When she came back with the drink, he said, ‘Why can’t we go back to living with Ellen and Wills and Jules and everyone? Why do we have to live in a house by ourselves?’

She explained – not for the first time – about all the family returning to London because the war was over, and coaxed him to drink a little. He was snuffling now, and she helped him to blow his nose. But when she started to tuck him up, he became frantic again. ‘I don’t want you to go!’

‘How would it be if you slept with me tonight? With Tedward and Grizzly in my bed? I’ll get you a night-light, and then when you wake up I’ll be with you.’ That seemed to go down well. She carried him to her room, went downstairs again and found a night-light, which she put in a saucer. When she got back to him, he was lying quite peacefully in her bed. She kissed him and he received her kiss with a dignified satisfaction. As she was leaving the room, he said, ‘Mum! I know why Dad doesn’t come here.’

‘Oh?’

‘The ceilings are too low for his head. It might be better if we got a taller house.’

‘I’ll think about it. Sleep tight.’

She went to tell Miss Milliment that she was now going to get supper, but in the kitchen discovered that the potatoes had boiled dry, had begun to catch on the bottom of the pan. She tipped them out, and cut the burned pieces off them. There was neither milk nor margarine to mash them. She put them on a tray with the remains of a meat loaf she had made. It would have to do. She was too exhausted to flunk about any other vegetable. She finished her gin: she wasn’t hungry, but luckily Miss Milliment wouldn’t see if she hardly ate any supper.

But Miss Milliment seemed to know some things whether she could see or not. After they had discussed Roland – she would ring the doctor in the morning – the current strike of the road hauliers, and the food shortages, the desirability or not of using the Army to distribute food supplies and the imminent shortage of potatoes, she said, ‘Viola, my dear, there is something I wanted to discuss with you—’ but then the telephone rang.

It was Lydia. Polly had asked her to stay the night, was that okay? She’d be back after breakfast. ‘Well, for lunch anyway,’ she said.

‘You haven’t got anything with you,’ she heard herself weakly (and pointlessly) saying.

‘It’s okay. Polly will lend me a nightdress and I took my toothbrush just in case she asked me.’

‘All right. Have a good time.’

‘I am! It’s lovely here.’

And horrible here, she thought, as she went back to the sitting room. ‘That was Lydia,’ she said, as she sat down at the small gate-legged table. ‘She’s staying the night with Polly,’ and then, without any warning, she burst into tears.

Up until now, she had preserved a tight-lipped silence on the subject of being abandoned: she had had, of course, to tell Miss Milliment that Edward was leaving her and going to live with someone else, but she had done it in such a way as to preclude any discussion – or, indeed, any further mention of it. Miss Milliment had listened, had said quietly how very, very sorry she was and that had been that. But now, it all poured out – she could not stop herself: the need to confide her terrible sense of humiliation and failure, her anger at being lied to and betrayed, her resentment that, having been, as she felt, a good wife for all these years and having therefore, in a sense, earned the peace and security of old age in the married state, she should now be faced with the anxiety and fear of ending her life alone – not that she felt she had any life to speak of anyway, but now, she felt, she was going to have to be grateful and obliged to people for any stray consideration or kindness, neither of which could, in any case, even assuage her loneliness because nobody would ever know or care about her desperately unhappy she was … She had stopped there for a moment, staring at Miss Milliment with streaming eyes. They could neither of them see each other, but Miss Milliment groped with her hand across the table until she found Villy’s and held it. And now, she said, Edward wanted her to divorce him so that he could marry this woman who had destroyed her life. And people seemed to think that this was perfectly reasonable. She should not only lose her husband, but virtually give him to someone else! Jessica, her own sister, thought something of the kind. And the friend she’d had lunch with today had seemed to think that divorce would stimulate her into starting some sort of career in ballet again – and teaching – since having given up her real career entirely for Edward she was, of course, too old to resume it. Think what Mama would have said about divorce! She stopped here, feeling that this was the cue for Miss Milliment’s shocked agreement. But it wasn’t. ‘I do not feel,’ she said, ‘that Lady Rydal’s views upon such matters can be of much use to you now, Viola. A very great deal has changed since her day. Had changed, in fact, long before her death. Divorce no longer carries the stigma that once it did. It cannot, since there are now so many – nearly a hundred thousand in the last two years, I remember reading in the newspaper. No. I am concerned for your unhappiness. I am acutely aware of that. It is what I wanted to talk to you about.’

Lydia saying ‘it’s horrible here’ recurred, and she said, almost angrily, ‘Oh! You mean I’ve been going about with a long face making everybody feel miserable! Well, I don’t see what I can do about that. I can’t change what has happened.’

‘No, you cannot.’

‘So?’

‘You have to think about what you can change.’

She was silent. She did not know – did not particularly want to know – what her old governess meant: she was almost back to sulking in the schoolroom, remembering how Miss Milliment used to lead, coax, invite her to arrive at conclusions, as it were by her own volition.

‘Responses?’ Miss Milliment said, after the pause. ‘It is possible to change those, and sometimes this can lead to a better understanding.’ She waited a moment. ‘I think of you as having so much generosity of spirit. I know of no one who takes the trouble to be so constantly and unobtrusively kind as you, my dear Viola. And I have admired this all the more because, ever since you took me in during the war, I have been conscious that your life has disappointed you or, perhaps I should say, has not presented you with the opportunities to realize to the full your considerable gifts. Is that not right?’

It was. It had always been true, but it was a bit late now to change that. ‘I’m nearly fifty!’

‘My father did not die until I was fifty-three and it was not until his death that I started to earn my living.’

It was different for her. She had had to – there was no money – but Villy did not like to say this.

‘Of course, it was necessary for financial reasons. But there are other kinds of necessity, aren’t there?’

‘You think I should find some work – get a job?’

‘I think you might enjoy having something to do that interested you beyond the domestic round. It is worth thinking about.’

‘But even if I did – find something – what has that to do with divorcing Edward? Do you mean I should shake that dust off my feet and say good riddance?’

‘Oh, I don’t think you would ever do or say that. It is not in your nature. No: presumably that is what he wants and it would be in keeping with your character if you made that gesture towards him.’ She was silent for a moment, and then she said: ‘I fear you may think that a monstrous suggestion. But whatever you do now will be difficult. Since Edward has gone, and you could not prevent that, remaining married to him in name will keep you trapped, as much as it will him. You will not be able to rid yourself of the idea – however unlikely – that he will return to you, and I fear you may come to hate him because he does not. It is extraordinarily difficult not to hate someone when one feels powerless with them.’ A small smile eddied its way from her mouth down into her chins. ‘Goodness! How I used to hate my father sometimes! And how miserable and wretched that made me feel! My dear Viola, I am afraid I have fallen into the trap of being wise after my own events, as it were. It was so clear to me afterwards – after he died – that I had never made my own wishes known to him, so how could he know that I had any? I saw myself as the dutiful, unmarried daughter, sacrificing my life to his comfort. It came to me afterwards that martyrs are not really good domestic company. Poor Papa! How dull it must have been for him.’

Villy became conscious of her hand being stroked. ‘I have great love and admiration for you,’ Miss Milliment was saying. ‘You were always my favourite pupil in those days. Such a good mind! So quick to apprehend and then apply yourself, as I remember telling your dear father. You were his favourite as well.’

Lying in bed beside Roland, with the night-light burning in case he woke (his fever seemed to have broken – his forehead was damp with sweat), she felt the same kind of feverish relief. For the first time in months she could feel the weight of her own body – a welcome lassitude, a fatigue that was certain to be recompensed by sleep. She turned on her side so that she could face her son: the sight of him made her feel weak with love.

‘I’m afraid I spilled a teeny drop or two, but I think it only went on to the sheet. Not the blankets.’ She smiled reassuringly at her daughter and dabbed her mouth with her napkin still in its napkin ring. She was having breakfast in bed, her pink bed-jacket draped round her shoulders. She could not put it on as she had broken her right arm when she slipped getting off a bus some weeks back; it was still in plaster and she had to wear a sling. This had meant, of course, that she was unable to dress or undress herself, had to be helped in and out of the bath, have her food cut up for her and, worst of all, was unable to knit – a pastime that she had so come to rely upon that Zoë recognized its impossibility as a real hardship.

‘I’ll go and get a cloth.’

‘I think it’s too late for that, dear. I did it just after you brought my tray, but I didn’t call you as I didn’t want to be a trouble.’

This remark or, rather, refrain – since it occurred at least half a dozen times a day – had almost, but not quite, ceased to irritate her. There were variations – a burden, a nuisance were two of the other things her mother said she didn’t want to be – but in this respect, her wishes seemed doomed. She had been living with them now for nearly three months, and there was no doubt at all that she was quietly, persistently, sometimes unobtrusively one or all of these things.

‘I’ll take your tray out now and come back later to help you get up.’

‘No hurry, dear. At your convenience.’

While she washed the breakfast things, Zoë thought despairingly of the sort of day she would once have had, before her mother came, and the sort of day she would have now. She had known it would be difficult, but the difficulties had been of a different kind from those she had envisaged. She knew now that her mother had changed a great deal since the days in the Earl’s Court flat. Years with Maud in the Isle of Wight had accustomed her to being the centre of unremitting attention. She had been treated as a semi-invalid, Maud had made all the dull or difficult decisions for her and, while allowing her to think that she was sharing the chores, had taken on the bulk of them.

When Zoë had brought her mother back to London in November, she had indeed been pathetic, sad, thin, tired, extremely anxious and also – particularly to Rupert – touchingly grateful for being taken in, as she put it. But as she became used to the situation she had gradually encroached upon Zoë’s time. She was always talking about Maud – in relation to herself. ‘She was such a one for little treats,’ she would say. ‘She would ask somebody to tea and not tell me till the last moment, or I would guess because I could smell her flapjacks in the oven.’ Or: ‘She loved surprises. She was always thinking up little ways to cheer me up. Once she drove me all the way to Cowes to have tea in Coffee Ann’s. And then we went to such a good shop to spend our sweet ration. In summer, she would sometimes make us lunch in the garden! She had a sort of rustic bower and a seat – not very comfortable, I must say, but she had an air cushion, which made all the difference. “If you don’t mind the earwigs, Cicely,” she would say, “we’ll have lunch al fresco – if you’re game.” Of course I always was. She took me to the hairdresser once a week. “We must keep up appearances,” she would say, “war or no war.”’ It had been going to the hairdresser that had resulted in her fall. She had, of course, gone on her own, not wanting to be a burden.

The worst of all this was that Zoë felt her exasperation and, indeed, boredom mounting, and hated herself for it. She would tell Rupert this when they were alone, and his responses had changed from defending her mother – ‘She’s really rather pathetic’ – to a wry acceptance that she was, in fact, a bit of a killjoy. Yesterday – the weekend – they had all been having tea, and Juliet had been explaining how at school they fed the birds, but the bread got all hard and frosty for their poor beaks, and then she had said: ‘I’ve got a very good wonderful kind idea for birds, Mummy. I shall spend the whole of next summer collecting worms and keep them in a box and then in winter I’ll give the birds one or two at a time – like rations.’

Mrs Headford had said, ‘I don’t think that worms are very nice for a little girl.’

‘I’m not going to eat them, Gran.’

‘I mean to talk about, dear.’

‘I think they’re very nice. I often talk about them. I talk about anything I think of.’ And seeing her grandmother’s head shaking at her with a maddening smile, Jules had added, ‘You needn’t talk about them if they frighten you.’

Rupert had caught her eye and winked.

They had tried very hard in the early days. Had taken her to the cinema – Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding. That had been a success: she had remarked that Maud had used to say how like she was to Anna Neagle. But when they had anyone to dinner she managed to infest the evening with gentility, with clichés, with a kind of trivial egocentricity that reduced everyone to dull compliance. After a particularly unfortunate evening when they had invited Villy and Hugh and she had held forth on her own (and Maud’s) views about divorce and refused to be deflected by any attempts on Rupert’s part to change the subject, they decided that dinner parties at home were temporarily out. ‘It’s not just that she puts her foot in it,’ Rupert said gloomily, ‘she keeps it there.’

‘I should have told her more about Villy,’ Zoë said. ‘I did tell her that Edward had left her, but I didn’t say that there was going to be a divorce.’

‘Well, I think that if we want to see people in the evening, we’d better take them out.’

‘But that’s terribly expensive, and anyway, Rupe, it’s not fair on you.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘Hugh seemed in good form, though.’

‘Yes, he’s very pleased about Poll’s engagement. He really likes the chap.’

After Mrs Headford broke her arm things got better about that, because she announced that if there were guests, she would rather have dinner in bed as she found having her food cut up for her embarrassing.

But then first Juliet and then Ellen were ill: influenza, the doctor said – it was raging, people were suffering from being cold nearly all the time since fuel shortages made it impossible to keep either houses or offices warm and the weather continued to be raw. It was the coldest February since 1881. Mrs Headford had knitted her granddaughter a thick cardigan for Christmas, but, unfortunately, she had chosen a pale pink wool, and Juliet hated pink. She stood miserably in the middle of the room while her grandmother admired her.

‘Aren’t you going to thank your Gran with a kiss?’

She walked over to the armchair, shut her eyes tightly, and gave her a quick peck.

‘You look so pretty in pink.’

‘I don’t want to look pretty, Gran.’

Mrs Headford thought this was a joke. At tea, Juliet reappeared minus the cardigan, wearing her father’s tweed cap the wrong way round, and a large charcoal moustache. ‘This is how I want to look,’ she said. She flatly refused to wear the cardigan at all, although every day, without fail, her grandmother asked why she wasn’t wearing it, until, in desperation, Zoë embroidered red poppies all round the cuffs and edge.

But now she could not knit, and the problem was how she should pass her time. Zoë offered books – novels that she thought light enough – but Mrs Headford simply opened and shut them and said she really only liked library books. This mysterious distinction involved regular trips to the library to select books which, in some cases, they already possessed. Rupert bought her a wireless for Christmas, and this certainly helped, although she remarked plaintively of this – as of reading – that one could not do it all the time. What she liked were little chats about her life in the Isle of Wight and little outings – rendered difficult because of the weather, and when influenza struck, impossible through lack of time. It seemed to Zoë that she spent all her time on freezing excursions to buy food, and then long hours preparing it, followed by exhaustive efforts to get the invalids – and her mother – to eat whatever it was. ‘I know I’m a rotten cook,’ she wailed to Rupert in the evenings, ‘but they all don’t like different things. Jules hates fish and milk puddings, and Mummy says stews give her indigestion, and Ellen won’t eat anything except Bovril made with powdered milk.’

Ellen recovered, and Rupert said that she had confided that she would like to spend a week with her married sister in Bournemouth.

‘I didn’t know she had a married sister!’

‘That’s where she always goes for her holidays. And she’s looking very frail – I think some sea air would do her good.’

‘Of course she must go.’ But she thought that she would still be doing everything, just when she had hoped that Ellen might take over the cooking again, at least.

Then, in the middle of that week, when Juliet was better but still not back at school and therefore bored and fractious, Hugh suddenly asked them to a party he was giving for Polly and Gerald.

‘Of course I can’t go,’ she said. ‘But you must.’

‘Darling, of course you can. Juliet will be tucked up in bed, and your mother will be here.’

‘She’s not very good with Jules.’

‘She won’t have to be anything with her, if Jules is asleep. Anyway, we can give her Hugh’s telephone number.’

So she agreed. She hadn’t been to a party for ages, and looked forward to it. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ her mother said, ‘I can always boil myself an egg.’

‘You won’t need to, Mummy. I’ll leave supper for you in the kitchen and Juliet will be asleep before we go.’

When Rupert came home from work, she was riffling through her wardrobe hopelessly. ‘I’ve nothing to wear!’

‘I’ll choose for you, then.’

‘You’ve got to wear black tie.’

‘I know.’ He was going through her dresses. She had far fewer clothes than she used to have. ‘You never wear this.’ He pulled out a short black silk dress. It was the one she had bought for her first evening with Jack.

‘I can’t wear a short dress!’

‘Well, nobody will have seen you in it because I certainly haven’t. And it looks pretty dressy to me. You should wear your hair up with it.’

In the end she did wear it. After all, she thought, either I should have thrown it away or I should wear it. It was simply taking another step away from Jack, and that was what she wanted to do.

They explained to Juliet that they were going to Uncle Hugh’s and that Gran would be there. This did not go down very well. ‘I really don’t want to stay here just with her. I want to come with you and see Wills.’

‘Wills is at school. You wouldn’t see him. And you haven’t got to talk to Gran. You’ll be asleep.’

‘I won’t! She might come into my room. She really smells so awful, Mummy.’

‘Jules, that’s nonsense – and rather unkind.’

‘It’s not unkind to say what people are. She smells …’ she wrinkled her nose as she thought ‘… she smells sort of like Irish stew with violets in it.’

‘Don’t you dare say that to her. It would hurt her feelings.’

‘I don’t want to say anything to her. She’s not good with children, my dear. That’s what.’

Rupert laughed when she retailed this exchange, but it worried Zoë. ‘Supposing she has a bad dream, or something?’

‘She won’t. She sleeps like a top, and your mother can always ring us at Hugh’s. After all, we’re only a few minutes away.’

Her mother was sitting in her armchair next to the gas fire. Zoë had undressed her earlier, and she was wearing her thick quilted dressing gown. ‘I can’t seem to get into this book,’ she said. ‘It’s all about a clergyman with a difficult wife – a depressing story.’

‘Well, perhaps you should give it up and listen to your wireless,’ she said, as she put the supper tray on the card table in front of her mother’s chair.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I’d better. The batteries have run right down so that I can hardly hear it.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I didn’t like to be a trouble.’

‘Here’s our telephone number at Hugh’s in case you need it. We’re just down the road, we can be back in a minute. Juliet is in bed. We’ll wait till she drops off.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m perfectly capable of looking after her. Mind you don’t catch cold in that dress, Zoë. It looks very skimpy to me.’

Rupert had said that he would tell Jules a story to settle her, and Zoë went upstairs to the sitting room to wait for him. Once, she thought, she would have wanted passionately to go to this party; she would have thought about it for weeks, would probably have made or bought a new dress to wear, and would have been utterly cast down if anything had happened to prevent her going. It seemed to her now to be a very long time since she had felt anything of the sort about anything at all. Ever since that evening before she had gone to the Island to fetch her mother, her relationship with Rupert had been in limbo: had altered neither for better nor worse; they were courteous, kind to each other and he had been, she recognized, immensely generous about having her mother, in spite of the many disadvantages this entailed. It cut down the time they could have alone together, but she thought, sadly, that perhaps that was a relief to him as well as to her. Certainly he never protested about it, any more than he teased her as he used to do. They were most at ease with or about Jules, whom he adored; but the rest of the time she sensed – not so much any more that he was withdrawn as that he was resigned. Looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace, she saw her image, the piled-up dark hair, the thin black shoulder straps emphasizing the whiteness of her skin, and remembered looking at herself in Archie’s flat, when she had dressed there before she had gone to meet Jack, the stranger she had met on a train that morning. Then, she had worn her pearls twined in her hair as she had no other jewellery with her; now, she wore the paste ear-rings that Rupert had given her years ago the Christmas before they had gone skiing with Edward and Villy. She was looking at her reflection but she hardly saw it, because it came to her then that the feelings she sensed in Rupert were a reflection of her own for him. She was no longer withdrawn, but a kind of resignation had taken the place of withdrawal. She was becalmed, trapped by responsibility and goodwill – but without anything more heartfelt. The nearest she had come to natural, spontaneous feeling had been that evening before she had gone to her mother, when she had thought that Rupert did know – somehow – about Jack. She remembered her instant terror when she had asked him how did he know, and then the extraordinary tide of hysterical relief when she had realized that he was talking about her mother – he had known nothing about Jack. Now, she recognized that she also had been stabbed by a disappointment: it had been as though she had been dragged to the edge of a cliff and there had been nothing for it but to take the plunge, only to discover that it was not a cliff, merely a dreary slope. If she had been forced to tell him more about something he already knew, it would be over, one way or another – there would have been some movement, some release from careful immobility. But to do it in cold blood. I simply have not got the courage, she thought, and her image looked back at her with contempt.

‘She’s off. I say, that is a good dress!’ He picked up her overcoat and helped her into it.

‘Is there really going to be dinner for everyone?’

‘A buffet. His secretary has done all the arrangements. She’s pretty efficient so I expect it will be all right.’

Hugh’s house seemed transformed. The large L-shaped drawing room had a fire burning logs that had a wonderful fragrance, and the room was full of blue and white hyacinths. Hugh stood by the fireplace with Polly. She was wearing a pearl grey satin damask dress with a tight bodice and a long full skirt below her tiny waist.

‘This is Gerald,’ she said, after she had kissed them, and a young man with rather bulging eyes blushed.

‘I say, Poll! You do elevate prettiness to an operatic level!’

‘It’s my dress, Uncle Rupe. Dad gave it to me.’

She saw Hugh smiling with pride, and thought how much younger he looked when he smiled. When she said how lovely the room was, he smiled again and said that Mrs Leaf had done it all. ‘She’s here, as a matter of fact,’ he added. ‘I couldn’t let her arrange everything and then not come to the party.’

Simon, very tall and elegant in his dinner jacket, appeared with a tray of champagne: more people were arriving, and the party began.

Throughout it, the drinks, the greetings, the buffet – everyone went down to the dining room to collect a plate and a glass of wine – she was conscious of, fascinated by Polly and Gerald. Even when she could not see them, the power of their happiness radiated the room: their love, which seemed bewitchingly mutual, engendered love from everyone else. She remembered her first dinner at Chester Terrace, to meet Rupert’s parents and brothers. How much she had been in love with Rupert then! And Rupert? Then she had been sure that he adored her, but now her sense of what that meant had changed; now she could see that she had been in love with a man far older than herself who had a dead wife and two of her children. She had been clear that he wanted her, and she had equated that with love; her mother had brought her up to believe that appearance won everything that could be desired. When she had married Rupert, she had been in love with his desire for her; now, she was no longer sure what else she had felt. It had taken Philip and his sexual revenge upon her vanity, and then Jack (for a moment, she could not bear to think what Jack had felt about her) to teach her anything about love. Jack … had he loved her? Not enough to stay with her, at any rate. But perhaps that was not fair; perhaps he had loved her and she had been part of the life that he gave up. I did love him, she thought, for the first time without anguish, I wasn’t enough for him, but I loved him. It was some comfort.

In the car going home, Rupert was very quiet. When she asked him what he was thinking, he said, ‘I was just hoping that Clary would find someone she could love like that. But I’m afraid she’s not like Polly.’

‘She will get over it.’ She knew that Clary had fallen in love with a married man and that he had called an end to the affair.

‘Yes. But getting over something doesn’t mean that you’re the same person that you were before. Clary loves people very seriously.’

They got home to find that Juliet was up, barefooted in her nightdress. The back door to the kitchen that led on to the garden was open and she was chopping up a loaf of bread. ‘I’m feeding the poor birds,’ she said; her teeth were chattering. ‘I took them out one bowl, but it didn’t look enough, so I’m doing some more.’

While Zoë shut the door, boiled a kettle for a hot-water bottle and wrapped her in a blanket, she said that she had woken up because she had dreamed about a horrible seagull who stole all the food ‘and bit the other poor birds with his horrible beak, so I had to make some breakfast for them, Mummy’.

‘Why didn’t you go into Gran’s room?’

‘I did. She was asleep, all muddled in her chair with the lights on. She doesn’t like birds.’

‘Let’s put her in a hot bath,’ Rupert said. ‘The fastest way to warm her up. I’ll do it, you go and see to your mother.’

She found her mother as Jules had described, but with the added horror that her library book had fallen from her lap and been partially charred by the gas fire.

‘Oh dear! I must have dropped off.’

‘And you nearly set fire to the house, Mummy – look at your book!’

‘Oh dear!’

‘And Juliet woke up and you didn’t hear her – she came into your room and you were fast asleep, and now she’s probably caught her death of cold going into the garden.’

‘That’s very naughty of her. She shouldn’t have done that. I was here all the time. She had only to wake me.’

‘Oh, Mummy! You were meant to be looking after her! We go out for one evening and she might have died!’

‘Don’t shout at me, Zoë, I couldn’t help dropping off. How was I to know that she’d wake? You said she never did!’

Before she could stop herself, she completely lost her temper. ‘And you said you were perfectly capable of looking after her! And apart from possibly being burned to death, she’s probably caught pneumonia! After all these months, this is the first time I’ve ever asked you to do anything for me, and look what happens! Well, I’ll never ask you to do anything again, you can be sure of that!’

Her mother’s face, her trembling mouth and frightened eyes stopped her. She was standing, ineffectively tugging at the zip on her dressing gown.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll do that for you.’

‘I think I’d better pay a visit to the bathroom first. You needn’t wait for me. I can put myself to bed.’

Zoë picked up the supper tray and took it out to the kitchen. Then she went back to her mother’s room, turned out the gas fire, and took the counterpane off the bed. Then she waited: she felt shaky and sour, but she couldn’t leave things like this, she wanted to apologize and get the hell out.

Her mother was a long time in the bathroom, and when she returned, Zoë saw that she had been crying.

‘I’m sorry, Mummy. I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.’

Her mother let herself be helped into bed without saying anything. ‘Shall I take your sling off? You don’t need to wear it in bed.’

She unpinned the silk scarf. As her mother lay down, she said, ‘I did my best for you. You may not have thought it much, but it was the best I could do. In the circumstances.’

‘I know you did. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

‘I was missing Maud,’ she answered with shaky dignity. ‘It’s hard losing your only friend when you’re my age.’

‘I know – I do realize that. We’ll talk in the morning.’ She kissed the soft pouchy cheek; an empty gesture that would only be significant if it had been absent. ‘Shall I turn off your light?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

When she and Rupert had settled Juliet, he took her arm on the stairs up to their bedroom.

‘Darling! You’re shaking! I’m sure she’ll be all right.’

‘I lost my temper with Mummy. It’s my fault – she’s not capable of anything after all these years of being looked after by her friend. Maud did everything for her – encouraged her to think of herself as an invalid. And now that’s just what she is.’

‘Ellen will be back soon,’ he said.

‘It will be easier when Mummy’s arm is out of plaster,’ she said.

‘Jules is a tough little egg. And, after all, the back garden is only about the temperature of the bathroom at Home Place. She’s used to being cold,’ he said, trying to coax a smile out of her and failing.

‘Let’s get to bed. It’s after one, and you’re dead beat.’

She thought she wouldn’t sleep, but she did – at once, and woke in the morning because Rupert had brought her a cup of tea. It was Saturday so he didn’t have to go to work. Jules was fine, he said; he was giving her breakfast. But there was still her mother’s tray to do. She drank the tea, put on her dressing gown and went down to the kitchen, where Rupert and Jules were sitting at the table.

‘We’re having kippers,’ Jules said.

‘Kippers?’ They couldn’t be.

‘Madam ordered kippers,’ Rupert said.

‘And this is a hotel splongdeed where you can get everything, Mummy.’

She held out a piece of toast spread with anchovy paste from her plate. Rupert had cut the toast into a fish shape.

‘Guests don’t usually eat meals with the waiter,’ she said.

‘I’m the manager,’ Rupert answered, ‘and this is a very special guest.’

She made her mother’s breakfast tray, and with a rather shaky determination to be bright and kind, went into Mrs Headford’s bedroom.

She was up – and partially dressed. That is to say, she was still wearing her bedjacket, but she had managed to get into her roll-on suspender belt and her knickers, and was struggling to fasten her stockings. She had lit her gas fire and drawn the curtains, whose window looked on to the back garden.

‘Oh, Mummy! You should have waited for me.’

‘You know I don’t like to be a burden.’ There was resentment in the familiar phrase.

‘You’re not, honestly. You can’t help your arm. Anyway, it will soon be better.’ She had put the tray down and knelt to do the suspenders.

‘The doctor said next week. So it won’t be long.’

‘No. That’ll be nice, won’t it? You’ll be able to finish your jumper.’

She hooked her mother into the bust bodice that half-heartedly encased the drooping white breasts, slipped the camisole over her head and eased the Viyella shirt sleeve on to the plastered arm. While she was buttoning up the front, her mother said: ‘I’ve been thinking, Zoë. I think I’d rather go home – to the cottage – when my arm is out of plaster. I can perfectly well manage for myself and Maud left me the cottage, after all. I don’t like to think of it empty.’

‘But you know the agent said he could let it for you in the summer, Mummy.’

‘I don’t like to think of it full of strangers among all Maud’s things. And anyway, dear, you have your own life, and you don’t really want me in it. You never have.’ The faded pale blue eyes met hers with an irrefutable directness. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘when I’m not wanted. And there’s no need to tell me that I am. I may be useless, but I’m not a fool. As soon as I’ve got back the use of my right hand, I shall write to Avril Fenwick and she will tell Doris I’m coming back and get the cottage ready for me. I don’t want to argue about this. I’ve thought it all out in the night. Would you pull that curtain further back, dear? It’s taking the light.’

Zoë went to the curtain and the window. Outside, snow, like coarse greyish sugar, lay in the little runnels on the blackened grass, and the bread that Jules had scattered sat in frozen lumps. She felt confused – because with the guilt about her failure there was irrepressible relief that her mother might leave (she realized then that the worst part of having her had been the feeling that it was for ever) – to which was added deep shame – that she should have such a feeling, and that she had behaved so badly in the first place as to make her mother consider such a course. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘I don’t think there is anything to say.’

‘I shouldn’t have been so cross last night, but I was frightened about Jules, you see.’

Her mother took a sip of tea and then put the cup back in the saucer. ‘Do you know, Zoë, ever since you were a little girl, you hardly ever apologized for anything, and when you did, you always made an excuse for what you had done to show that it wasn’t your fault.’

All of that day, which seemed interminable, she struggled with this indictment. Was it fair, or true? If it was true, it must be fair. Whatever it was, it rankled bitterly inside her. She could not tell Rupert of her mother’s decision because she didn’t want to talk about it in front of Jules. She sent them out shopping while she tidied the flat and prepared lunch; she remembered to ask Rupert to get some batteries for her mother’s wireless. At least she had remembered that. But when Rupert returned with them and installed them of course it was he whom her mother thanked.

As a treat she had used the week’s meat ration for a Sunday joint. She had chosen pork, because Ellen, who was very good at that, had told her how to cook it. With it she had made apple sauce, mashed potatoes and cabbage, which always seemed to turn out rather watery but at that time of year there was not much choice of vegetable.

Rupert carved. ‘I say! This is a bit of all right!’ he said, in the cheery voice she noticed he seemed always to use when her mother was present.

‘No crackling for me,’ Mrs Headford said.

‘PLEASE DON’T CUT MY MEAT UP!’ Jules shouted.

‘It’s not yours, darling, it’s Gran’s.’

‘Oh. Can I have her crackling?’

‘No. You’ll have your own crackling.’

‘No cabbage! I hate it. I—’

‘Cabbage is good for your complexion,’ Mrs Headford observed.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your skin,’ Rupert said, putting her plate of food in front of her.

‘My skin? My skin? A funny thing, Mummy. You know how people sweat? When they have little blobs on their forehead when they get hot? Well, why don’t blobs of rain go in? Because Ellen says they don’t. She said skin’s waterproof, but if sweat comes out it can’t be, can it?’

‘I see what you mean,’ Rupert said. ‘Perhaps some does go in and you don’t notice.’

‘I don’t think we want to talk about that at lunch-time.’

‘I do, Gran.’ She seized a bit of her crackling in her fingers and bit into it with her sharp white teeth. ‘What would you like to talk about?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I know! Dad says that Polly is getting married. It’s in June. Can I be a bridesmaid, Mummy? It is my turn. Lydia was last time, and she’s far too old now. She’s marrying a man called Gerald Lord.’

‘No, darling, he is a lord. He’s called Gerald Fakenham.’

‘What’s a lord, Dad?’

‘It’s a title. You know, like Dr Ballater being called doctor.’

‘What are lords good at?’

‘A good question. Well, the same things as other peoople, really. Or not, as the case may be.’

‘I expect he has a very nice house and grounds,’ Mrs Headford said, ‘and plenty of money. Very nice for your niece.’

‘I don’t think he’s got any money at all, but Hugh says he’s a very good egg and they both seem very happy.’

‘A good egg, Dad? How can a person possibly be an egg?’

‘It’s just a phrase. It means a good person.’

‘Jules, darling, do eat your lunch.’

‘I am, Mummy, bit by bit.’ She speared a slice of meat with her fork and bit a piece of it.

‘Cut it up first, Jules.’

‘It sounds silly, marrying an egg.’

‘And don’t talk with your mouth full.’

‘Mummy, I can’t do both the things you say. I can’t eat my lunch and not talk with my mouth full.’

And so it went on, the atmosphere saved by Juliet’s prattle. At least Zoë’s mother didn’t bring up the subject of her going then.

Afterwards, they took Juliet to Kensington Gardens to see if there was ice on the Round Pond. Zoë had got some stale bread from the baker’s without coupons so that Juliet could feed the ducks – one of her favourite occupations. Mrs Headford, invited to come, said that she would have a little rest.

Home before it was dark. It had been freezing in the park, and standing about, while Juliet fed the ducks, she had nearly told Rupert about her mother, but each time she was about to start, Juliet claimed their attention.

‘What’s up, darling?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Something’s worrying you.’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

Tea and toast with Marmite to conceal the taste of the bright yellow margarine. Then they played games with Juliet: Rupert tried very hard to get his mother-in-law to join in, but she said she couldn’t play cards with one hand, and when he suggested Pelman Patience, she said she could never remember where any of the cards were. ‘Pegotty, then,’ Rupert said, and they played that, although Jules said she didn’t like it.

Eventually, and by what seemed tediously slow progression, Juliet was bathed and put to bed, supper, mostly left-overs, was laid on the table, eaten and washed up, and then Mrs Headford said that she was tired and would go straight to bed and listen to her wireless. So Zoë helped her mother undress, filled her hot-water bottle, waited while she went to the bathroom, and helped her into bed. During all this, nothing was said about the future, beyond that tomorrow she would have breakfast in bed and wait there until Zoë had returned from taking Juliet to school to give her her bath. Eventually she escaped upstairs to the sitting room, exhausted.

‘There’s a spot of brandy left. Would you like it with soda or neat?’

‘With soda, I think.’

‘Coming up.’

‘Now, then,’ he said, when he handed her her glass. ‘What’s going on? The atmosphere was pretty sticky at dinner, I thought.’

She told him.

‘Perhaps she doesn’t really mean it,’ he said. ‘It might just be because you were cross with her.’

‘She does. I mean, I’m sure it is to do with me being cross with her, but she does mean it.’

‘Do you think she can manage by herself?’

‘Well, she couldn’t before.’

‘I must say, I can’t see her cooking much, or that sort of thing. She didn’t do a thing to help you today.’

‘She can’t with no right arm. But she says, as soon as the plaster is off, she’s going to get in touch with Miss Fenwick – the friend who lives nearby – to get the cottage ready.’

‘I suppose she couldn’t just go back there for the summer when it would be easier for her, no fires etcetera, and spend the rest of the year with us?’

‘Oh, God – I don’t know. It’s just so awful, day after day. I don’t know what to do with her, and she doesn’t get on with Jules – or Ellen, come to that.’

‘Poor darling, I do realize how difficult you find it.’

‘Well, you do too, really. You’re much nicer about it than I am, but meals are awful just with her, and we’ve tried having people and we know that’s out. And it’s going to go on for years and years! She’s not sixty.’

‘It’s partly this flat,’ he said. ‘There’s not enough room. If she had her own sitting room it would be easier.’

‘I don’t think it would. She would be wanting to be with us all the time, so even when she wasn’t I’d feel guilty.’

There was a short silence while she watched him take a cigarette out of a bright blue packet and light it. Then she said, ‘If I’d been nicer to her when it was easier to be it – I mean, when I only had to see her sometimes – I wouldn’t feel so bad about her now. Goodness, that smells far better than your usual cigarettes. Could I have one?’

He offered her the packet and lit one for her. For a moment it reminded her of Jack’s cigarettes, but only for a moment: these did not have the slightly burnt-caramel taste of the Lucky Strikes.

‘How do you get French cigarettes?’

‘A place in Soho. I only smoke them occasionally.’ He sounded defensive.

‘I don’t mind what you smoke, darling.’

‘The fact is that you’ve never got on with her, and of course she must know that. I’m not blaming you,’ he added hastily. ‘I’m just saying that that’s what makes it so difficult. Perhaps it would be better if she did go.’

‘But, Rupert, that’s the problem. I feel I can’t let her go and I feel I can’t stop her from going.’

They talked in this way for some time. He offered to talk to her mother, but she refused. She was afraid of what her mother might say about her: she was in that state when every suggestion that he made seemed unavailing. Eventually, he gave up and she could sense that he was aggrieved at the lack of a solution.

‘I think you just feel everything is insoluble because you’re dead beat,’ he said. ‘Come on. Bed.’

As she followed him into the bedroom, she thought of all the different ways in which, long ago, he had made that suggestion.

A few days later, she took her mother to Dr Ballater to have the plaster taken off her arm. Yes, he said, she could use it normally; the muscle tone would soon return. ‘But don’t go hopping on and off buses in this weather,’ he had added, looking at Zoë as he spoke, as though, she felt, she had made her mother go in buses.

Mrs Headford spent the afternoon writing letters – or, rather, although she had described this activity in the plural, one rather long letter, which she asked Zoë to post when she went to fetch Juliet from her dancing class. The subject of her mother leaving was still not mentioned between them.

She took her shopping – to her favourite old-fashioned drapers, Gaylor and Pope, where when you paid the lady at the counter wherever you bought what you wanted, your money and bill were put into a small canister and whizzed away along wire to the cashier, returning with your receipted bill and any change required. Mrs Headford had made a list and they ploughed through it: knickers, warm stockings, bedroom slippers, some petersham ribbon to trim her summer hat, buttons for the cardigan she was now able to finish, bias binding, elastic, some hairnets, a bath-cap, and a bag to keep her knitting in. She was indefatigable, and kept remembering things that she wanted that she had not put on the list.

Zoë had resolved to be infinitely patient about the expedition, and to take her mother out to lunch after the shopping was done.

‘Oh, I should like that,’ she said, when this was proposed. Marylebone High Street also contained one of those places where chiefly women went, generally for elaborate cake and tea or coffee, but which also served simple, genteel luncheon dishes, such as omelettes or cauliflower cheese, and they went there, and sat at a very small round table so surrounded by carrier bags that the waitress could hardly reach them.

‘I seem to have bought the shop up,’ her mother said happily.

‘Shopping clearly does you good.’

‘And things are much better now, aren’t they, Zoë, now that you know I’m going.’

‘You know I’m worried about that.’

‘Yes, dear. But I shall be all right. Doris is very good to me, and she will help me with the cooking, and, as Maud always said, Avril is a brick. And I think I shall get a cat for the company.’ Later, she said, ‘And of course you must bring Juliet for a visit. As you know, we’re not far from the seaside.’

‘She’s absolutely determined,’ she told Rupert that night.

‘Perhaps you’d better take her down and make a point of seeing this friend of hers and asking her to get in touch with us if she’s worried.’

‘Oh, God! I suppose I’d better.’

‘I’m only pointing out that if you’re worried about her this would be something you could do about it.’

She sensed that they were nearly quarrelling and that it was because she was so full of conflicting feelings about it. She did not tell him that, in the taxi coming home after the shopping spree, her mother had said, ‘You know, Zoë, I don’t think you appreciate how lucky you are to have your husband back from the war. You’re not faced with being a widow at twenty-four as I was, with a little girl to bring up on my own. He’s a very nice man and you should do everything you can to make him happy.’

‘I think he is happy.’

‘Do you, dear? Well, I’m sure you know best.’

Nothing more was said, but again, this parting shot of her mother’s unnerved her. Was he happy? He was devoted to Juliet and when he was doing things with her he was the old Rupert she had married – kind and funny, full of small jokes and sweetness of temper. With her he was patient, gentle and, she now felt, somewhat bored: there was nothing light about their relationship – it seemed to be composed of myriad small duties, and whenever these seemed, temporarily, to come to an end, there was a kind of void, a feeling of tension and uncertainty. With Ellen back, there were fewer tasks for Zoë, and consequently more of the tension.

The letter from Avril Fenwick arrived promptly – she must have replied by return of post, Zoë thought, as she took it in on her mother’s breakfast tray.

When she went to fetch the tray, she found her mother still in bed, the letter spread before her and her breakfast untouched.

‘Oh Zoë!’ she cried. ‘Such news! Such a wonderful letter! I’ve never had such a letter in my life. Poor Avril! She didn’t want to tell me because she thought I would be so upset, but when,’ wrote to her she says she saw her way clear at once! And she was ninety-six, after all. As Avril says, it was a good age and she had a wonderful life. But it’s so kind of her! I can’t get over it!’

‘Mummy, perhaps I’d better read the letter.’

‘Do, dear. It’s such a wonderful letter, do.’

She did. She had gathered that old Mrs Fenwick had died, and read through the paragraph that enumerated her many – Zoë felt hitherto well-concealed – virtues. Her courage, the way she always spoke her mind, never mind to whom or the circumstances, her zest for life – and here there was a menu of the foods she had most enjoyed – her high standards about other people’s behaviour, her wonderful endurance of a difficult marriage, to a man who was always either working or obsessed by his collection of butterflies and whose early death had proved a blessing in disguise, Mother had never really seen the point of then … Zoë gave up at this point and went on to the next page. Here, Miss Fenwick suggested at some length that Mrs Headford might like to ‘team up’ with her, share her cottage and ‘stick it out’ together. She said how much she would enjoy looking after her, what a lot they had in common, how, if they pooled their resources, they would have more money, and all kinds of little trips might be arranged, and finally what a kindness it would be if Cicely were to accept, since she contemplated living alone, after all these happy years with mother, with such dread. Finally, she begged Cicely to think it over carefully without hurrying about her decision, and meanwhile she would be delighted to get Cotter’s End ready for her return. The letter ended ‘with ever so much love, Avril’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful of her? When she had her own grief to bear, to think of me.’ She was trembling with excitement. ‘If you don’t mind, Zoë, I shall send her a telegram. I should go at once. To think that she’s gone through the funeral weeks ago and I never knew! So the sooner I go the better.’

‘Would you like to speak to her? You could ring her up.’

‘I couldn’t, dear. She’s not on the telephone. Her mother didn’t like the idea. They had one for a bit, but her mother said that Avril talked on it too much.’

The telegram was sent, and in it she arranged to leave in two days’ time.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Oh, no, dear. Avril will meet me. Either at Ryde, or she will come over on the ferry and meet me at the station in Southampton.’

All day, she talked about Avril and her letter. She had no hesitation about her decision, she said. It was the most wonderful opportunity. And then came out – streamed out – how frightened she had been at the prospect of living alone: the long evenings, the noises at night, the absence of anyone to talk to, the fear that she might not manage if anything went wrong – the gas cylinders, for instance, they were so heavy and could be dangerous, they could leak without you knowing it – and the shopping when she didn’t have a car and could not drive and so on. All of it made Zoë feel she had felt so unwelcome in London with them – with her.

When Rupert got back from work and was informed, he made martinis and entered into her mother’s spirit of festivity. He listened to an account of the letter, was given it to read and then told its contents all over again; throughout, he was patient and charming to her, while she, Zoë, was virtually silent. When Ellen sent Juliet up to say goodnight, her grandmother said: ‘I’m going back home, Juliet. I’m going back to the Island. Will you come and visit me in the summer?’

‘Will there be other people on it?’

‘Oh, yes, dear. All my friends. It’s a big island. You’ve been there, you remember.’

‘I don’t because I was a baby.’ She shut her eyes tightly to kiss her grandmother and escaped.

‘Well!’ Rupert said, when Zoë’s mother had gone to bed and they were on their own in the drawing room. ‘All’s well that ends well. Are you taking her down?’

‘No. She wired her friend, and she’s coming here to escort her home. She seems to want to, and that’s it.’

‘Well, that seems to me a good thing,’ he said tiredly. ‘Obviously this Avril person is fond of your mother.’

‘She said – Mummy, I mean – how nice it would be for us to be on our own again.’

‘And will it?’

‘I don’t know, Rupert. Will it?’ She looked at him; there was a moment when they both seemed frozen. It came to her that that was how it had been for a very long time, and also that they could stay like that, or move on to something better or worse.

She said, ‘We’ve never talked about what it was like for either of us all those years that you were away. I want to now. I have to tell you something.’

He had been standing by the fireplace fiddling with the fire. Now he straightened up, looked quickly at her and then sat on the arm of the chair opposite: almost, she thought, as though he was poised for escape.

‘You sound very serious, darling,’ he said, and she recognized the voice that he used when he thought she was about to make a scene.

‘Yes. While you were away, I fell in love with someone. An American officer I met on a train coming back from seeing Mummy on the Island. He asked me to have dinner with him – and I did. It was the summer of 1943: I’d heard nothing from you for two years – not since the note that the Frenchman brought. I thought you were dead.’ She swallowed: that sounded like an excuse, and she didn’t want to make any excuses. ‘Anyway, that’s not the point: I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. We had an affair. I used to go to London to be with him, telling all sorts of lies to the family. Only for short times – he was taking war pictures for the American Army, so he was often away. When it got to the Normandy landing, he was away a lot’ She thought for a moment, she was anxious now not to gloss anything over, leave anything out. ‘He wanted to marry me. He wanted to meet the family – and particularly Juliet. We had our first – row – well, really the only one we ever had – about that. Because I wouldn’t agree—’

‘To marry him?’

‘No. I wanted to do that. But to tell the family about it when we didn’t know whether you would come back or not. And then, the following spring, nearly a year after the invasion and still we heard nothing from you, he had to go to photograph one of the concentration camps, I think it was Belsen. About a week later, he suddenly rang me at Home Place to ask me to go to London that night, and I couldn’t because I’d said I’d look after the children while Ellen had a weekend off. By then the war was so nearly over and I was – I was imagining going to America with him. I got back from taking the children for their afternoon walk and there he was, sitting next to the Duchy at tea. The Duchy was wonderful. I think she knew but she never said anything. She told me to take him into the morning room after tea so that we could be on our own. He was different – unreachable, somehow. He said he had to go back to London at once as he was flying the next morning. He was going to another camp. He said,’ for the first time she felt her voice trembling, ‘he said he was glad he’d seen Juliet. He said he was going to be away for a long time. Then he went.’ She stopped. ‘I never saw him again.’

‘He went back to America without a word?’

‘No. He died.’ It was a great effort to tell him how Jack had died, but she managed it. ‘About six weeks later, you came back. Oh. There was one important thing I’ve left out. He was Jewish. That’s why. Why he killed himself.’

There was a long silence. Then he got up and came over to her, took her hands and kissed them. ‘You’re still in love with him?’

‘No. I don’t think I could have told you if I was.’ Then she became anxious that some element of truth would elude her. ‘I shall always have love for him.’

‘I understand that,’ he said; she saw tears in his eyes.

‘It’s a great relief to have told you.’

‘I admire you so much for telling me. Love and admire you. You have been far braver than I.’

And while she was still trying to understand what he meant, he began to tell her his tale. As he told it, she could not imagine why none of this had occurred to her before. He had been away so long: he had been left by Pipette with this woman who had taken them in, and on whom he had in the immediate future to depend. When, in the telling, he lapsed from Michèle to the diminutive – his pet name for her – she felt a dart of jealousy and was almost glad of it. Then, as he told her about how the woman had gone to so much trouble to get him painting materials, she thought how little she had ever supported him in that, but when he described the visits of Germans to the farm, she realized how potent this isolation plus danger must have been. And then he came to the difficult part. The invasion, and his continued stay at the farm, and the reason for it. For he did not gloss things over, or excuse himself, or pretend that he had not loved her. She had wanted him to stay and see the child, and then she had sent him away. He did not even say that it had been he who had made that decision. ‘I am really trying to match your honesty,’ he said. ‘I can’t match you in anything else. It was not excusable to you,’ he said, ‘leaving you all that time without knowing. I owed Miche a great deal, but not, perhaps, that. But that is what I did. Archie said I should tell you,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t.’

‘Archie? You told him?’

‘Only Archie. I told no one else.’

‘Archie knew about Jack. I took Jack to have a drink with him one evening, and it was Archie who Jack wrote to before – he died. He came down to Home Place to tell me.’

‘He certainly has been a repository of family secrets.’

‘But that’s hardly his fault, is it? He’s simply the kind of kind, loyal person who gets told things.’

‘You’re right. Oh, Zoë, how much you have changed!’

‘Do you,’ she said – she was dreading the possible answer – ‘do you keep in touch with her?’

‘No. Oh, no. It was agreed that we should part completely. No letters, no visits, nothing at all.’

‘You must have found that very hard.’

‘It’s been hard for both of us.’

‘For her? How do you know?’

‘For us, my darling. Things have been hard for us.’

‘I suppose we made them worse than they need have been.’

‘I don’t know. I feel as you do. I couldn’t tell you about Miche until it was over for me. Or over enough.’ He touched her face, stroked her cheekbone with one finger. ‘Oh, the relief! To know you again! And you began it. You were the brave one.’ She wanted to catch his gaiety – his relief – but she could not. She was not finished, and now, what was left to tell him seemed the worst of all. She remembered the Duchy saying that one should not burden other people with the responsibility of one’s experience – or something of the kind. The whole business of Philip had happened to someone she scarcely recognized as herself. But then she had had the baby that had turned out to be Philip’s – and she had put Rupert through all the misery of her pregnancy, labour and subsequent loss, and through all of that he had attended to her, had never once claimed any of the grief or loss for himself. She had to put that right, whatever it cost.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

She felt herself blushing – with shame and fear – but she made herself look at him.

‘That first baby,’ she began, haltingly, trying to find the right words.

His expression changed, and for a moment it was as though he looked far into her and saw all that was there; then he took her hands again and said in a voice that was both gentle and casual, ‘It was rather a changeling, wasn’t it? I think we should both let it lie. Will you do that with me?’

Tears rushed to her eyes, and with the first spontaneous gesture since his return, she threw herself into his arms.

‘You stay put. I’ll get Mrs Greenacre to bring you some breakfast.’

‘I only want tea. I couldn’t face anything solid.’

‘Poor darling!’ he said heartily. ‘Perhaps you’d better give the doctor a ring.’ He had bathed and shaved and dressed, and was standing in the middle of the room, poised to go for his breakfast.

‘No need – it’s just gastric flu. You go down, darling, or you’ll be late.’

‘Right.’

When he had gone, Diana crept out of bed to go to the lavatory, where she had spent a good deal of the night. He had left the bathroom window open, and the gale had knocked the Bakelite tooth-mugs off the window ledge into the bath. She bent to pick them up and felt a wave of nausea. She shut the window. Grey clouds were scudding across the sky at an unearthly rate, and the garden was full of the tiny petals from the pink may trees. It looked as though it would rain again. She ran a basin of hot water and laved her face. She looked awful. Once, she would never have allowed Edward to see her like this, but now she supposed it was different – or very nearly different. The divorce was in hand, thank God, but she had been warned that it would take months. Villy was divorcing him for adultery: when she had questioned this, he had said that the lawyers had said that it was either that or desertion, which would take a great deal longer. Her face was not even romantically pale: it was more grey with a yellowish tinge, and her hair looked matted and dull. She cleaned her teeth and picked up Edward’s comb, but it was thick with his hair oil. She went back to the bedroom to find her own comb; by then she was shivering.

Mrs Greenacre duly arrived with a tray of tea and lit the gas fire. She also shut a window – Edward insisted on sleeping in a draught. Diana asked for her handbag and, when she was alone, found her dry rouge and dabbed a bit on her cheekbones. Edward would be sure to come and say goodbye to her before he left for the office.

‘You look better already, darling,’ he said, when he did so. ‘Better warn you – the Government’s latest decree is that we can’t have any fires from now until September.’

‘Oh, Lord! Turn it out, then.’

‘Nonsense! You’re ill. I’m not having you cold. Get better, sweetie. I’ll be back a bit later because I’m going to the doc.’

‘Oh, yes.’

He bent to kiss her and she smelt lavender water and hair oil – scents that used to excite her about him. ‘Look after yourself.’

‘I’m sorry I look so awful.’

‘You don’t look awful! You look beautiful. I love you – remember? – as always.’

‘I love you.’

He was gone. She heard him talking to Mrs Greenacre, and then the front door slam. As she drank some of the tea she reflected how often they said this to one another these days. It was a kind of ritual refrain, not so much a declaration as a staunching process; without it, everything might leak away. This thought frightened her: it seemed extraordinary, almost inconceivable, that something she had wanted for so long was not making her deliriously happy. It was more that not having it would be so terrifying that she could not contemplate it. She had thought that her discontent was due to uncertainty: first, that he would not ever leave Villy and live with her and then he had, and then that even if he lived with her, he would never press for a divorce, and then he had. But the feeling of – disappointment persisted, compounded now by the moral obligation to be desperately in love with someone who had done all that for her. And somewhere, buried, because she did not want it to be a certainty, she was afraid that he felt the same – had the same disappointment, felt the same necessity to reiterate his tremendous love for her to justify what he had done. So every day, often several times a day – or, rather, evening – this ritual of love was declared aloud between them, although she derived less and less comfort from it.

It was not even as though they lived a life of sweetness and light, artificial or no. There had been ructions … Now, because she was feeling rotten and there was nothing else she had the energy to do, she must lie and contemplate them.

There had been the awful half-term when Ian and Fergus had come to them. They were at the same boarding school, and spent most, if not all, of their holidays with their grandparents in Scotland. The moment they arrived at the house, she had sensed their hostility, not only to Edward but to her. With Ian, the eldest, nearly seventeen, it had taken the form of taciturnity, and the determination not to be impressed by anything. With Fergus, two years younger, it had been rather senseless boasting, accounts of how he had beaten people at games or exams, or simply by some clever remark. When Edward spoke to them, they barely answered. He had been good to them, had taken them all to Nicholas Nickleby and out to dinner afterwards. He asked them what else they would like to do, and they had said they would rather go off on their own. Which they did, for nearly the whole of Saturday, and were uncommunicative about where they had been. Jamie, who had got very excited about their visit, was also snubbed.

She had prepared a large room for them on the top floor of the house and when she showed it to them, had said, ‘This is to be your room, so you can keep things in it for when you come.’

And Ian had answered, ‘There’s no need, Mum. We won’t be coming. We’d rather be in Scotland.’

When she had taken them to the station in the car with Edward and seen them off, she had cried. He had been very nice to her about that, said that she couldn’t help the fact that due to the war and everything of course it had been better for them to be in Scotland. But she’d lost them, and somewhere, because she felt so guilty about it, she had wanted to blame Edward.

Then, and far more recently, they had had an actual row about the nights he spent in Southampton. He went once a week, and two weeks ago, had rung to say he would have to spend an extra night there. Instantly, pictures of his wartime deception of Villy occurred to her. He had used to ring her up, or tell her he’d rung Villy up, with some story that he said had ‘made things perfectly all right’. Perhaps that was what he was doing now, with her, she had thought, and once she had thought it, she could not get it out of her mind. She knew, better than most, how susceptible he was; she also knew, better than anyone, that he was not going to bed with her with the same enthusiasm and frequency. So, surely it was obvious – or at least very likely – that he was going to bed with someone else. She tried ringing the hotel where he said he was staying, and they said he was out. When he came home she confronted him with this. ‘I was in the dining room!’ he exclaimed. ‘Silly buggers, why didn’t they look for me there – or page me or something? Why did you want to get hold of me anyway?’ he asked a moment later.

‘I wondered where you were.’

‘I told you where I was.’

‘Yes, but then I couldn’t get hold of you.’

‘Not my fault,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to them about that next week.

‘Where did you think I’d be?’ he then asked.

‘I didn’t know. Well, of course I thought you’d be at the hotel, or I wouldn’t have rung it.’

‘I meant when you didn’t get me there.’ His eyes had become quite hard, which she knew they did when he was beginning to get angry.

‘I had no idea, darling. I was worried.’ If only, at this point, she had said something like, ‘After all, I am rather attached to you’ or ‘I was really worried about your poor tum’ (his indigestion, though intermittent, was sometimes acute), things might have calmed down, but she didn’t. There had been a brief pause while Mrs Greenacre brought in the cheese and celery and then he had continued to press her: where did she think he might be?

‘I suppose I thought you might have gone off with some bright young thing …’

He was outraged, not in the least flattered, simply angry. His anger had all the exaggerated resentment that she had associated with people accused when they were innocent of something they habitually did. In the end, she apologized – abjectly, with tears in her eyes – and he forgave her. Afterwards, she reflected wearily, all she had done was put the idea into his head.

There had been brighter moments – or, rather, better times. Easter at Home Place, for instance. The Duchy was spending a few weeks there during the holidays, and she and Edward were invited down for a long weekend.

‘Who will be there?’ she had asked. She felt both nervous and excited at the prospect.

‘Rupe and Zoë, and my sister Rachel and poor old Flo – that’s the Duchy’s sister – and Archie Lestrange, an old friend of Rupe’s, well, of the whole family, really. And Teddy and Bernadine – I don’t think she’s been before, either, and she’ll be far more of a fish out of water than you’ll ever be, darling.’

‘It’s a lot of people to meet at once for the first time.’

‘You know Rupe and Zoë.’

‘Will Hugh be there?’

His face clouded. ‘No. He’s taken Wills off on some boating holiday with friends.’

And so, on a Friday evening, they drove down. It poured with rain until the last few miles when the sun came out suddenly, making all the fresh wet greens of trees and fields glisten, and bluebells were like woodsmoke on the ground in the woods. ‘It is the most lovely time of year,’ she said. She associated the country with being cold and lonely: now she was going with Edward to be received into his family. She had some minutes of pure happiness.

Edward smiled, and laid a hand on her knee. ‘This is rather different from those times when I used to drive you down to Isla’s cottage,’ he said, ‘isn’t it, sweetie? This is a bit of all right.’ He had stopped at Tonbridge and spent all their sweet coupons on expensive chocolates, two boxes. ‘Violet and rose creams for the Duchy,’ he said, ‘she does love them, and truffles for the rest of us.’

They were driving now down a hill with high banks each side of the road, and woods on their right. White gates appeared on the right and they went in.

The house, rambling and rather shabby, was larger than she had expected. A small man with bandy legs met them and carried their luggage.

‘Evening, Tonbridge. How’s Mrs Tonbridge?’

‘Keeping very nicely, sir, thank you. Good evening, madam.’

They followed him through the wicket gate to the front door.

In the large hall Edward led her straight to the Duchy, who was arranging daffodils on a long table. She was greeted kindly: Edward had said that his mother was nearly eighty, but she did not look it, and her eyes, the same colour as Edward’s, looked straight at and, Diana felt, through her with a direct simplicity that was unnerving. ‘I think Rachel has put you in Hugh’s room,’ she said. She had wondered whether they would be allowed to share a room, and was relieved as well as surprised.

They met Rachel on the stairs. Like her mother, she was dressed in blue but she was taller and extremely thin. Her hair was shingled in a very old-fashioned manner – nowadays one associated that kind of hair-do with lesbians, she thought.

‘Darling! You’ve cut your hair off! When did you do that?’

‘Oh, not very long ago. You know you’re in Hugh’s room, don’t you? We’ve put Teddy and Bernadine in your old one.’

She had gone faintly pink – the hidden allusion to Villy, Diana supposed.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ Rachel was saying: her smile was warm, her gaze like her mother’s.

Diana followed Edward along the gallery landing to the end where there were two doors and the passage turned to the left.

‘Here we are!’ The room looked out on to the front lawn where there was a monkey puzzle tree with daffodils under it. ‘The bathroom’s along the passage, down two steps and turn left,’ Edward said. ‘And the lavatory’s next door to it.’

She went along the passage to the lavatory. Clouds of steam were creeping out from under the bathroom door and there was a smell of expensive bath essence. As she returned, she heard peals of laughter coming from the room next to theirs. Then the door opened and there was Rupert in white shorts and a shirt. ‘Oh, hello, Diana! You didn’t by any chance notice whether the bathroom is free, did you? I’ve just had a rather humiliating game of squash with Teddy, and Zoë says I smell like a very expensive horse.’

‘How I imagine an expensive horse would smell,’ Zoë said as she appeared behind him.

‘Hello.’ She smiled at Diana: she was wearing a pale green bath towel like a sarong; her hair hung down her back and she looked extremely beautiful. When she said that someone was having a bath, Rupert said, ‘It’s Bernadine. She’s been there for hours.’

‘I expect Teddy’s in there with her.’

‘Oh, is he, indeed?’ He stalked along the passage and banged on the door. ‘Are you in there, Teddy? Well, hurry up. I need a bath.’

‘Although I expect the hot water will have run out,’ Zoë said. ‘I hope you don’t want one.’

No, she didn’t.

Back in the room, she asked, ‘Do we change for dinner?’

‘Only a bit, not much. We change more on Saturdays.’ He was mixing up some white stuff in a glass of water. ‘I thought I’d be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘I’d rather knock this back and not worry about what I eat.’

The room was quite cold. She unpacked and put on her petrol-blue woollen dress with long sleeves and settled at the dressing table to do her face.

‘Darling, I’ll leave you. They’ll want me to make drinks.’

‘Where will you be?’

‘The drawing room. Bottom of the stairs and then opposite you on the left. Don’t be long.’

While she combed her hair, powdered her face, and added a discreet touch of blue mascara to her eyelashes, she thought how extraordinary, in fact, it was to be there, the place where she had miserably imagined Edward weekend after weekend during the war. When Rupert and Zoë had come to dinner with them she had thought how unlike Edward Rupert had been, and that although Edward had said how pretty Zoë was, she had seemed rather lifeless. This evening, draped in that peppermint towel, she had looked like a film star, effortlessly fresh and glamorous with that wonderful creamy magnolia skin and those clear green eyes. Of course, she was years older than Zoë, and one’s hair when it was permed and tinted, never looked quite the same. She tied a mauve chiffon scarf loosely round her neck to conceal it and went down to find Edward.

In the drawing room she found him talking to a very tall dark man, who rose from his chair when she came in.

‘Archie, this is Diana,’ Edward said. ‘I’ve just made a splendid martini.’

‘How do you do?’ He had a limp, she noticed, and a domed forehead from which his dark hair was receding, and very heavy curved eyelids. He looked at her in a manner that was both penetrating and impassive, and she felt wary of him. It was clear, though, that he was much appreciated by the family. The Duchy made him sit next to her at dinner, during which there was a good deal of general conversation. They ate roast lamb, which reminded someone of the frightful floods – ‘two million sheep were drowned,’ Rachel was saying, ‘poor dears.’

‘I don’t suppose it was any worse for them than being killed any other way,’ Teddy said. He was sitting next to Bernadine, who wore what could only be described as a cocktail dress, of turquoise crêpe with bands of gold sequins round the sleeves and neck. She kept putting pieces of skin and fat on his plate and he obediently ate them. On her other side was Edward, with whom she was flirting in a worn, girlish manner that made him dull and breezy. They talked – briefly – about the violence and uncertainty in India: Archie said it looked as though we were going to divide and not rule for a change, and Edward made his usual remark about what a damn shame it was that we were casting off the Empire as fast as we could. But what could you expect, considering the government we had?

‘I love our government,’ Rupert said. ‘Don’t you think it’s fascinating that the moment the war is over, we stop having dramatic chaps like Churchill and Roosevelt, and opt for quiet little then who look like bank clerks – like Truman and Attlee? It makes peace comfortingly middle class. More roast drowned lamb, please.’

The Duchy said, ‘Stop teasing your brother, Rupert.’

Bernadine fitted a cigarette into a long holder and lit it. This, Diana saw, did not go down well with anybody, and after a moment Teddy muttered, ‘We don’t smoke until after the port.’

Bernadine shrugged, gave him an angry look and then smiled and shrugged again as she stubbed it out on her side-plate. ‘I shall never get used to your British ways.’ So she had to wait, sulking through the rhubarb tart and cheese.

‘That was all right, wasn’t it, darling? They liked you – that was plain to see,’ Edward said when they were going to bed. ‘You fit in a jolly sight better than Teddy’s wife.’

She opened her mouth to say that she hoped she did, but desisted. Instead, she said, ‘It must be very difficult for her. I think she was bored, poor thing.’

‘Oh, well, I expect she’s wonderful in bed,’ he answered. ‘And you know what it’s like when you’re young.’

‘She’s not young! She looks older man Zoë. Is she the kind of girl you’d have gone for when you were Teddy’s age?’

‘Lord, no! When I was his age I was madly in love with a sweet, innocent girl called Daphne Brook-Jones – we got engaged, in fact, but we didn’t dare tell our families.’

‘Why not?’

‘We knew they wouldn’t approve,’ he said. She sensed that he didn’t want to tell her why.

‘We used to go riding in the Row before breakfast,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we just met at parties.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Oh, she married someone else,’ he said.

‘And you?’

‘I met Villy,’ he said shortly.

So his marriage had been a kind of rebound, she thought after he had made rather perfunctory love to her and gone to sleep. She had the feeling that there was more to his first love affair (if that was what it had been) than she would ever find out. But the knowledge that his marriage had been a rebound made her feel more sure of herself.

The weekend was pleasant but uneventful. ‘It seems so strange to be here without any of the children,’ Rachel said at one point.

‘Except me,’ Teddy said: he was consuming an enormous Sunday breakfast.

‘Well, yes, darling, but you are grown-up now.’

‘So is Louise. So is Simon. So are Polly and Clary.’

‘Yes. There are only the babies left.’

‘They’re not babies, they’re what we used to be.’

‘Well, I miss the long table in the hall and the nursery meals,’ Rachel said. ‘Thread this needle for me, would you, Zoë? I need new specs – can’t see a thing.’

‘Even Lydia thinks she’s grown-up,’ Teddy said. ‘Oh, Lord, I nearly forgot Bernie’s tray.’ She preferred to have breakfast in bed, he had earlier explained, and he put far more than her share of butter on the tray when he took it up. The Duchy, Rachel said, who deeply disapproved of people having any meals in bed unless they were too ill to eat anything, had said that he must be responsible for bringing the tray down to the dining room so that it could be cleared away with the rest of breakfast.

Diana went round the garden with the Duchy, who showed her her gentians. ‘They aren’t doing as well as I had hoped, but it’s lovely to have them. Do you like gardening?’

‘I think I should like it, but either I haven’t had the garden or when I had a cottage during the war there never seemed to be time.’

‘Ah. But you have three children?’

‘Four. Three sons and a daughter.’

The Duchy asked their ages, and Diana explained about the older ones being brought up by grandparents. ‘I have Jamie, but he’s just started prep school. So only Susan is at home.’

‘And how old is she?’

‘Almost four.’

‘And she is Edward’s child,’ the Duchy said tranquilly. It was hardly a question.

‘Yes – yes, she is.’

There was a pause, and then the Duchy said, ‘I don’t think that Edward’s wife knows this, and as there is to be a divorce, there seems to be no need to broadcast the fact. I hope you agree?’

‘Yes.’

She did not tell Edward about this exchange.

A great deal of the conversation consisted of family affairs. Polly’s wedding, for instance. Everybody seemed pleased about it, and the wedding was to be in July. Diana felt rather out of this, because she thought she was the only person who had not met Polly’s fiancé. ‘A nice young man,’ the Duchy said.

‘He’s no pin-up,’ Bernadine confided to her, ‘but she’ll have a title, and they say he’s got no money, but it sure doesn’t sound like it. He has a house as big as a hotel, so she can’t be short of dough the way Teddy and me are.’ (The remark about Polly had come out of a fairly long ingenuous ‘chat’ that she’d had with Diana about making ends meet and the meanness of Cazelets in this respect, which she knew she was supposed to hand on to Edward.)

‘Hugh is so pleased. He’s become a different person since Polly’s engagement,’ Rachel said. ‘He looks ten years younger.’

‘Clary will miss her,’ Rupert said. ‘They’ve been such friends for so long. When is she coming back to London, Archie, do you know? Archie?’

He had been knocking out his pipe against the grate, and seemed not to have heard. ‘I think she’ll come back when she’s finished her book,’ he said.

‘The best thing is that they’re so tremendously in love,’ Zoë had exclaimed, and Diana saw Rupert give her a very loving look. They’re in love, she thought. They really are. And envy briefly possessed her.

But on Sunday evening, when they were alone, Edward said, ‘Don’t get too excited about this wedding.’

‘I’m not, but why not? It sounds very happy.’

‘We shan’t be attending it, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not? I’ve met everyone now, and they seem to have accepted me.’

‘Because Hugh wants Villy to go. That’s why. Villy was awfully good to Sybil when she was dying, and Hugh has never forgotten that.’

‘Oh. Does that mean he’ll go on refusing to meet me?’

‘I don’t know. He may do. He’s stubborn as hell about some things. And there are other differences between us. It’s not just you.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ she said.

‘Are you?’ He looked hurt. ‘You know there are.’

Of course she did. It was all about capital investment and Southampton and things which, although he had told her about them, had seemed so tortuous, unresolvable and actually rather boring that she kept forgetting how much they preyed upon his mind. ‘Darling! I’m sorry! I know it worries you. I only wish there was something I could do to help.’

‘Sweetie! You do help. I love you very much, you know.’

‘I know. And I love you.’

Then, when they had returned to London, there had been the fearful business about John. The hospital had rung about an hour ago, Mrs Greenacre said, but when she had rung Home Place she had been told they had left. It was about Major Cresswell. He was in the Middlesex Hospital.

‘I’ll take you,’ Edward had said, and they had gone straight away without even ringing the hospital.

‘Do you think he’s been in a car accident or something?’

‘I don’t know, darling. He could just have had a particularly bad attack of malaria.’

‘They wouldn’t have rung us about that, surely?’

‘Or a heart attack or something like that. It’s no good worrying about what it is, we can’t know. Just have to get there as fast as we can.’ It was pouring with rain again, but there was not much traffic.

‘He took an overdose,’ the ward sister told them, ‘but fortunately, he was found in time. We’ve pumped him out, and he’s quite comfortable. Your name was in his address book so, naturally, we telephoned your number.’

She was leading the way down a ward. He was in a bed at the very end of it. Edward said he would wait for her outside. There was a chair by the bed and she sat on it. He lay, looking very grey and pinched with his eyes shut, but he opened them when she said his name. ‘Johnnie! It’s me, Diana.’

He looked dazed. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t think what to do.’ She took his hand. He gazed at her earnestly. ‘It’s no use,’ he said, ‘I simply can’t – find … Haven’t even managed that, though, have I? Here I am again.’ He tried to smile and a single tear slid slowly out of one eye.

She stroked his hand. ‘Darling Johnnie, it’s all right. I’m here.’

‘There isn’t anyone to talk to, you see.’ He shut his eyes again, then, with them still shut, he said, ‘That was one good thing about the camp. No shortage of that kind of thing.’

‘I think you should get some sleep now. I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll talk properly.’

‘Poor old chap. What an awful thing!’

By dint of much questioning she discovered that no, he wasn’t much good at the job he had at Cazalets’; that they’d kind of made a job for him, but it wasn’t really working out. He kept worrying about how to do it, and asking other people. Hugh had thought he should go, and Edward had persuaded him to let things run for a bit longer.

‘Tell you what. Why don’t you talk to Rachel about him? She’s really good at that kind of thing.’

And she had been. Diana had rung her and she had come round the same day and they had had a long talk, and Rachel had said she would go and see him. ‘He sounds as though he is too lonely, poor fellow,’ she had said.

Diana felt grateful and relieved. Then she began to worry about where he should go when he came out of hospital, which, she had gathered from her second visit, was to be as soon as possible. Obviously, she could suggest his coming to her, but her heart sank at the prospect, and although she guessed that Edward would agree to such a scheme, she knew that he wouldn’t want it.

But Rachel had fixed everything. ‘I hope you don’t think I’ve been too bossy,’ she said on the telephone that same evening, ‘but Sister Moore said there was really no point in his remaining in hospital so I’ve arranged for him to go and stay with an old colleague of mine – a retired sister, who takes people in from time to time for light nursing or convalescence. She lives in Ealing, so you could visit him there. But I’ve told her what’s been going on, and she’s a very sensible person. I’m sure she will get him over the next stage. And, meanwhile, we can find him something more congenial to do than sit in a cubbyhole at Cazalets’ struggling with figures, which he says he’s not good at. I think what we should aim at is getting him a job in some community or institution, somewhere where there is built-in company for him. Sister Moore said that he was underweight, and his kidneys are not too good, so he needs a good rest first. I’ve talked to him a bit about this and told him that I’ll go and see him when he’s in Ealing.’

When she tried to thank Rachel, she was interrupted: ‘Oh, no. It’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing. I only hope you don’t think I’ve been too bossy. He’s such a sweet fellow and he deserves a better deal. There must be hundreds of people like him, mustn’t there? Who’ve really been wounded in the war, but in ways that don’t show so they simply don’t get the right attention.’ She paused for breath. ‘There was one rather sad thing. He gave me his address book because he wanted me to ring his dentist to cancel his appointment. The only addresses and numbers in it were the dentist and you.’

The morning had almost gone. As she got up, with the notion of having a bath, she thought about her visit to Johnnie the previous week. A fortnight with Sister Crouchback had worked wonders. He looked less shrunken and less generally pathetic; there was some colour in his face, and his clothes looked well cared-for – a properly ironed shirt, and his trousers pressed, his sparse hair neatly combed, his shoes polished. ‘He’s been learning to knit,’ Sister Crouchback declared. ‘Taken to it like a duck to water. And he’s cut my privet for me quite beautifully. I’m beginning to wonder what I’d do without him.’ And she saw him turn pink as she ended, ‘There’s nothing like having a man about the house, though I say it as shouldn’t.’

How lucky I am, she thought, compared to Johnnie! And she lay in the bath, counting up her blessings: a nice large house, not beautiful but convenient, a housekeeper who relieved her of all the shopping and cooking that had dominated her life for so long, four healthy children, and Edward, who had given up his marriage to marry her. What more could she want? But somehow she did not feel up to pursuing this question.