Brodie and Va Va spent their first summer together sitting in large saucepans of water in the cratered bomb site which was their Islington garden. Inside the flat, beneath the stone gaze of a golden seraph and an Egyptian king, Patrick wrote while Eleanor, unaware of the existence of shops beyond Harrods, tried to keep her children fed and clothed on an income which didn’t come in.
Patrick gave her some money and offered to look after the children while she went and bought herself something to wear. Eleanor went shopping, the prospect of a new dress eclipsing the suspicion she should have felt at Patrick’s uncharacteristic behaviour. At lunch-time she returned. She hugged the babies; they were both dressed in velvet. She turned to Patrick, astonished that he should have dressed them at all. He stood by the tiled fireplace, an expression of benign surreptitiousness on his face.
‘Thomas Bevin and Trixie will be here in half an hour,’ he said. ‘We are going to baptize the children.’
Eleanor railed at his trickery, gathering Brodie and Va Va on to her knee like a New Testament mother faced with King Herod. ‘It’s not that I don’t want them to be Catholic. But I don’t like your methods.’
Patrick was meek. ‘How right you are, my love, how right you are.’
The doorbell rang. Thomas Bevin, a Jesuit priest with a brow furrowed like celery, arrived with Trixie, a friend of Eleanor’s from Oxford. Bevin was to officiate. Trixie was to be godmother and Patrick had selected a young poet, Raj Singh, as godfather. He had failed to get hold of any other Catholics, so had decided that the children should share godparents.
Bevin sat in a crumbling armchair covered in mattress ticking. He sipped a glass of wine and ignored the half-eaten chocolate biscuit Va Va placed on his knee.
‘Raj is not a suitable person to bear responsibility for any child’s soul,’ he announced. ‘You will have to find another godfather, Patrick.’
Half an hour remained before the service. Patrick and Eleanor resigned themselves to picking someone off the street. They were joking about how to spot a Catholic in Islington when the doorbell rang again.
Kevin Toller, a lazy journalist with a taste for whisky, slouched in fondling a bottle of Famous Grouse. ‘Patrick,’ he said, puffing whisky fumes into the little room, ‘I came to share this with you and to watch the Cup Final.’
‘Dear boy,’ said Patrick, ‘you are here by divine intervention. We are baptizing my children and you shall be their godfather.’
Toller protested, to no avail. Va Va and Brodie were christened in black and green velvet and Eleanor’s parents were very angry.
Patrick’s first love was the Muse and she danced in the aisles of the Church of Rome. He talked about her as if she were a difficult girlfriend. ‘She’s bitched me up again,’ he growled after a day of crumpling paper into balls and raining them down around the rubbish bin. He abided by none of the conventions which make a good Catholic, but he believed in the saints and suffered from guilt.
His faith was handed down to him by his mother, an Irish peasant whose only education was the poetry she had learned by heart at school. She was a fervent Catholic, and worshipped with an ardour perfectly pitched between the Brompton Oratory and the Queen’s Elm pub in Chelsea. Patrick’s learning came not from school but from conversations with young monks at the Oratory who appeared like hungry starlings at his mother’s table.
By the time Va Va was three, the basement flat in Islington could no longer contain the family. Eleanor was pregnant and Patrick was being driven insane by trying to write in a tiny room invaded by beaming, screaming children. They had no money with which to buy a house, and in desperation Patrick answered an advertisement in The Times for a house to rent in Norfolk. He drove up to see it and was enchanted.
The front door was open when they arrived at Mildney, a house Eleanor was seeing for the first time. Furious on the flagstones of the hall, spiky like an unopened chestnut, was a tiny ginger kitten. Out of the Mercedes slithered Marmalade the black cat, spitting vicious urban expletives at the kitten before slinking into the shadows of the house.
Tired and hot, with legs patched pink where they had stuck to the leather seats of the car, Va Va and Brodie got out and looked at their new home. Mildney. A seventeenth-century farmhouse, part brick, part dimpled flint, and all damp. Va Va scarcely glanced at the house but looked across at the garden stretching away in every direction through tangles of flowers and crouched bushes. Under her feet an expanse of green loomed, as big as any in a London park. Her legs took over and, racing, she carved a circle in the long grass. Brodie followed, fingers splayed like feathers as they swooped faster and faster. Va Va somersaulted and fell on the grass. ‘Listen. There’s no noise, no noise at all.’
Brodie stood a moment and smiled. ‘There is noise. I can hear the trees talking.’
They laughed, sinking, rolling like beached fish.
Patrick came out of the house and took their hands. ‘Come, dear hearts, I have something to show you.’ He led them round the beech hedge, which flamed high and gold above the lawn, and through a line of knobbly oaks. ‘Close your eyes now,’ he said, and the ground slid as he led them down a hill, fronds of bracken tickling their legs. Patrick stopped. ‘Now look.’
They were on the bank of a slow, silent river; floating like blobs of ice-cream on the black surface were two swans.
‘Look, Daddy, look! Swans. Can we keep them? What are their names? Where’s that one’s head?’ The children’s voices tumbled out, shrill and urgent. One swan, delving deep in the weeds beneath, uncoiled her long neck, rearing from the water. She hissed menace and warning. Patrick led the children back up the bank.
‘Those are Isabella and Isabeau,’ he said. ‘They are magical birds and at bedtime I will tell you their story.’
That night they sat together in bed, shoulders stiff with anticipation. Patrick began. Isabella and Isabeau were the guardians to the gates of Halicarnassus, the pillared home of Shalimar the winged horse. Brodie and Va Va, one moment barbed excitement, the next slumped, were asleep.