Life after life

July 1914

FROM THE OPEN French windows Sylvie watched Maurice erecting a makeshift tennis net, which mostly seemed to involve whacking everything in sight with a mallet. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

Noisy chatter in the hallway announced the jaunty arrival of Margaret and Lily, once schoolfriends and now infrequent acquaintances, bearing gaily beribboned gifts for the new baby, Edward.

Margaret was an artist, militantly unmarried, conceivably someone’s mistress, a scandalous possibility that Sylvie hadn’t mentioned to Hugh. Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs. Sylvie thought of women being restrained while tubes were pushed down their throats and raised a reassuring hand to her own lovely white neck. Lily’s husband, Cavendish (the name of a hotel, not a man, surely), had once cornered Sylvie at a teadance, pressing her up against a pillar with his goatish, cigar-scented body, suggesting something so outrageous that even now she felt hot with embarrassment at the thought of it.

‘Ah, the fresh air,’ Lily exclaimed when Sylvie led them out into the garden. ‘It’s so rural here.’ They cooed like doves – or pigeons, that lesser species – over the pram, admiring the baby almost as much as they applauded Sylvie’s svelte figure.

‘I’ll ring for tea,’ Sylvie said, already tired.

They had a dog. A big, brindled French mastiff called Bosun. ‘The name of Byron’s dog,’ Sylvie said. Ursula had no idea who the mysterious Byron was but he showed no interest in reclaiming his dog from them. Bosun had soft loose furry skin that rolled beneath Ursula’s fingers and his breath smelt of the scrag-end that Mrs Glover, to her disgust, had to stew for him. He was a good dog, Hugh said, a responsible dog, the kind that pulled people from burning buildings and rescued them from drowning.

Pamela liked to dress Bosun up in an old bonnet and shawl and pretend that he was her baby, although they had a real baby now – a boy, Edward. Everyone called him Teddy. Their mother seemed taken by surprise by the new baby. ‘I don’t know where he came from.’ Sylvie had a laugh like a hiccup. She was taking tea on the lawn with two schoolfriends ‘from her London days’ who had come to inspect the new arrival. All three of them wore lovely flimsy dresses and big straw hats and sat in the wicker chairs, drinking tea and eating Mrs Glover’s sherry cake. Ursula and Bosun sat on the grass a polite distance away, hoping for crumbs.

Maurice had put up a net and was trying, not very enthusiastically, to teach Pamela how to play tennis. Ursula was occupied in making a daisy-chain coronet for Bosun. She had stubby, clumsy fingers. Sylvie had the long, deft fingers of an artist or a pianist. She played on the piano in the drawing room (‘Chopin’). Sometimes they sang rounds after tea but Ursula never managed to sing her part at the right time. (‘What a dolt,’ Maurice said. ‘Practice makes perfect,’ Sylvie said.) When she opened the lid of the piano there was a smell that was like the insides of old suitcases. It reminded Ursula of her grandmother, Adelaide, who spent her days swathed in black, sipping Madeira.

The new arrival was tucked away in the huge baby carriage under the big beech tree. They had all been occupants of this magnificence but none of them could remember it. A little silver hare dangled from the hood and the baby was cosy beneath a coverlet ‘embroidered by nuns’, although no one ever explained who these nuns were and why they had spent their days embroidering small yellow ducks.

‘Edward,’ one of Sylvie’s friends said. ‘Teddy?’

‘Ursula and Teddy. My two little bears,’ Sylvie said and laughed her hiccup laugh. Ursula wasn’t at all sure about being a bear. She would rather be a dog. She lay down on her back and stared up at the sky. Bosun groaned mightily and stretched out beside her. Swallows were knifing recklessly through the blue. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower being pushed by Old Tom in the Coles’ garden next door, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of the pinks in the border and the heady green of new-mown grass.

‘Ah,’ said one of Sylvie’s London friends, stretching out her legs and revealing graceful white-stockinged ankles. ‘A long, hot summer. Isn’t it delicious?’

The peace was broken by a disgusted Maurice throwing his racquet on to the grass where it bounced with a thump and a squeak. ‘I can’t teach her – she’s a girl!’ he yelled and stalked off into the shrubbery where he began to bash things with a stick, although in his head he was in the jungle with a machete. He was going to boarding school after the summer. It was the same school that Hugh had been to, and his father before him. (‘And so on, back to the Conquest probably,’ Sylvie said.) Hugh said it would be ‘the making’ of Maurice but he seemed quite made already to Ursula. Hugh said when he first went to the school he cried himself to sleep every night and yet he seemed more than happy to subject Maurice to the same torture. Maurice puffed out his chest and declared that he wouldn’t cry.

(‘And what about us?’ a worried Pamela asked. ‘Shall we have to go away to school?’

‘Not unless you’re very naughty,’ Hugh said, laughing.)

A pink-cheeked Pamela balled up her fists and, planting them on her hips, roared, ‘You’re such a pig!’ after Maurice’s indifferent, retreating back. She made ‘pig’ sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.

‘Pammy,’ Sylvie said mildly. ‘You sound like a fishwife.’

Ursula edged nearer to the source of cake.

‘Oh, come here,’ one of the women said to her, ‘let me look at you.’ Ursula tried to shy away but was held firmly in place by Sylvie. ‘She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?’ Sylvie’s friend said. ‘She takes after you, Sylvie.’

‘Fish have wives?’ Ursula said to her mother and Sylvie’s friends laughed, lovely bubbling laughs. ‘What a funny little thing,’ one of them said.

‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.

‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.

‘Children,’ Margaret said, ‘they are droll, aren’t they?’

They are so much more than that, Sylvie thought, but how do you explain the magnitude of motherhood to someone who has no children? Sylvie felt positively matronly in her present company, the friends of her brief girlhood curtailed by the relief of marriage.

Bridget came out with the tray and started to take away the tea things. In the mornings Bridget wore a striped print dress for housework but in the afternoons she changed into a black dress with white cuffs and collar and a matching white apron and little cap. She had been elevated out of the scullery. Alice had left to get married and Sylvie had engaged a girl from the village, Marjorie, a boss-eyed thirteen-year-old, to help with the rough work. (‘We couldn’t get by with just two of them?’ Hugh queried mildly. ‘Bridget and Mrs G? It’s not as if they’re running a mansion.’

‘No, we can’t,’ Sylvie said and that was the end of that.)

The little white cap was too big for Bridget and was forever slipping over her eyes, like a blindfold. On her way back across the lawn she was suddenly blinkered by the cap and tripped, a music-hall tumble that she rescued just in time and the only casualties were the silver sugar bowl and tongs that went shooting through the air, lumps of sugar scattering like blind dice across the green of the lawn. Maurice laughed extravagantly at Bridget’s misfortune, and Sylvie said, ‘Maurice, stop playing the fool.’

She watched as Bosun and Ursula picked up the jettisoned sugar lumps, Bosun with his big pink tongue, Ursula, eccentrically, with the tricky tongs. Bosun swallowed his quickly without chewing. Ursula sucked hers slowly, one by one. Sylvie suspected that Ursula was destined to be the odd one out. An only child herself, she was frequently disturbed by the complexity of sibling relationships among her own children.

‘You should come up to London,’ Margaret said suddenly. ‘Stay with me for a few days. We could have such fun.’

‘But the children,’ Sylvie said. ‘The baby. I can hardly leave them.’

‘Why not?’ Lily said. ‘Your nanny can manage for a few days, surely?’

‘But I have no nanny,’ Sylvie said. Lily cast her eyes around the garden as if she was looking for a nanny lurking in the hydrangeas. ‘Nor do I want one,’ Sylvie added. (Or did she?) Motherhood was her responsibility, her destiny. It was, lacking anything else (and what else could there be?), her life. The future of England was clutched to Sylvie’s bosom. Replacing her was not a casual undertaking, as if her absence meant little more than her presence. ‘And I am feeding the baby myself,’ she added. Both women seemed astonished. Lily unconsciously clasped a hand to her own bosom as if to protect it from assault.

‘It’s what God intended,’ Sylvie said, even though she hadn’t believed in God since the loss of Tiffin. Hugh rescued her, striding across the lawn like a man with a purpose. He laughed and said, ‘What’s going on here then?’ picking up Ursula and tossing her casually in the air, only stopping when she started to choke on a sugar lump. He smiled at Sylvie and said, ‘Your friends,’ as if she might have forgotten who they were.

‘Friday evening,’ Hugh said, depositing Ursula back on the grass, ‘the working man’s labours are over and I believe the sun is officially over the yardarm. Would you lovely ladies like to move on to something stronger than tea? Gin slings perhaps?’ Hugh had four younger sisters and felt comfortable with women. That in itself was enough to charm them. Sylvie knew his instincts were to chaperone, not to court, but she did occasionally wonder about his popularity and where it might lead. Or, indeed, have already led.

A détente was brokered between Maurice and Pamela. Sylvie asked Bridget to drag a table out on to the small but useful terrace so that the children could eat their tea outside – herring roe on toast and a pink shape that was barely set and quivered without restraint. The sight of it made Sylvie feel slightly queasy. ‘Nursery food,’ Hugh said with relish, observing his children eating.

‘Austria has declared war on Serbia,’ Hugh said conversationally and Margaret said, ‘How silly. I spent a wonderful weekend in Vienna last year. At the Imperial, do you know it?’

‘Not intimately,’ Hugh said.

Sylvie knew it but did not say so.

The evening turned into gossamer. Sylvie, drifting gently on a mist of alcohol, suddenly remembered her father’s cognac-induced demise and clapped her hands as if killing a small annoying fly and said, ‘Time for bed, children,’ and watched as Bridget pushed the heavy pram awkwardly across the grass. Sylvie sighed and Hugh helped her up from her chair, bussing her cheek once she was on her feet.

Sylvie propped open the tiny skylight window in the baby’s stuffy room. They called it the ‘nursery’ but it was no more than a box tucked into a corner of the eaves, airless in summer and freezing in winter, and thereby totally unsuitable for a tender infant. Like Hugh, Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life. (The loss of a nice house in Mayfair, a beloved pony, a faith in an omniscient deity.) She sat on the button-backed velvet nursing chair and fed Edward. ‘Teddy,’ she murmured fondly as he gulped and choked his way to sated sleep. Sylvie liked them all best as babies, when they were shiny and new, like the pink pads on a kitten’s paw. This one was special though. She kissed the floss on his head.

Words floated up in the soft air. ‘All good things must come to an end,’ she heard Hugh say as he escorted Lily and Margaret indoors to dinner. ‘I believe the poetically inclined Mrs Glover has baked a skate. But first, perhaps you would care to see my Petter engine?’ The women twittered like the silly schoolgirls they still were.

Ursula was woken by an excited shouting and clapping of hands. ‘Electricity!’ she heard one of Sylvie’s friends exclaim. ‘How wonderful!’

She shared an attic room with Pamela. They had matching small beds with a rag rug and a bedside cabinet in between. Pamela slept with her arms above her head and sometimes cried out as if pricked with a pin (a horrible trick Maurice was fond of). On one side of the bedroom wall was Mrs Glover who snored like a train and on the other side Bridget muttered her way through the night. Bosun slept outside their door, always on guard even when asleep. Sometimes he whined softly but whether in pleasure or pain they couldn’t tell. The attic floor was a crowded and unquiet sort of place.

Ursula was woken again later by the visitors taking their leave. (‘That child is an unnaturally light sleeper,’ Mrs Glover said, as if it were a flaw in her character that should be corrected.) She climbed out of bed and padded over to the window. If she stood on a chair and looked out, something they were all expressly forbidden to do, then she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. Hugh stood at the back gate, waiting to escort them along the lane to the station.

Sometimes Bridget walked the children to the station to meet their father off the train when he came home from work. Maurice said he might be an engine driver when he was older, or he might become an Antarctic explorer like Sir Ernest Shackleton who was about to set sail on his grand expedition. Or perhaps he would simply become a banker, like his father.

Hugh worked in London, a place they visited infrequently to spend stilted afternoons in their grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead, a quarrelsome Maurice and Pamela ‘fraying’ Sylvie’s nerves so that she was always in a bad mood on the train home.

When everyone had left, their voices fading into the distance, Sylvie walked back across the lawn towards the house, a darkening shadow now as the black bat unfolded his wings. Unseen by Sylvie, a fox trotted purposefully in her footsteps before veering off and disappearing into the shrubbery.

‘Did you hear something?’ Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillows, reading an early Forster. ‘The baby perhaps?’

Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun.

‘No,’ he said.

The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully.

‘The best one yet,’ Hugh said.

‘Yes, I think we should keep this one.’

‘He doesn’t look like me,’ Hugh said.

‘No,’ she agreed amiably. ‘Nothing like you at all.’

Hugh laughed and, kissing her affectionately, said, ‘Good night, I’m turning out my light.’

‘I think I’ll read a little longer.’

One afternoon of heat a few days later they went to watch the harvest being brought in.

Sylvie and Bridget walked across the fields with the girls, Sylvie carrying the baby in a sling that Bridget fashioned from her shawl and tied around Sylvie’s torso. ‘Like a Hibernian peasant,’ Hugh said, amused. It was a Saturday and, freed from the gloomy confines of banking, he was lying on the wicker chaise-longue on the terrace at the back of the house, cradling Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack like a hymnal.

Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.

The sun had long since started on its steep climb into the sky by the time they finally set off, awkwardly encumbered with the baby, and picnic baskets, sun-bonnets and parasols. Bosun trotted along at their side like a small pony. ‘Goodness, we’re burdened like refugees,’ Sylvie said. ‘The Jews leaving Israel, perhaps.’

‘Jews?’ Bridget said, screwing up her plain features in distaste.

Teddy slept throughout the trek in his makeshift papoose while they clambered over stiles and stumbled on muddy ruts made hard by the sun. Bridget tore her dress on a nail and said she had blisters on her feet. Sylvie wondered about removing her corsets and leaving them by the wayside, imagined someone’s puzzlement when they came across them. She had a sudden memory, unexpected in the dazzling daylight in a field of cows, of Hugh unlacing her stays on honeymoon in their hotel in Deauville while sounds drifted in from the open window – gulls screeching on the wing and a man and a woman arguing in rough, rapid French. On the boat home from Cherbourg Sylvie was already carrying the tiny homunculus that would become Maurice, although she had been blissfully unaware of this fact at the time.

‘Ma’am?’ Bridget said, breaking this reverie. ‘Mrs Todd? They’re not cows.’

They stopped to admire George Glover’s plough horses, enormous Shires called Samson and Nelson who snorted and shook their heads when they caught sight of company. They made Ursula nervous but Sylvie fed them an apple each and they picked the fruit delicately from her palm with their big pink-velvet lips. Sylvie said they were dappled greys and much more beautiful than people and Pamela said, ‘Even children?’ and Sylvie said, ‘Yes, especially children,’ and laughed.

They found George himself helping with the harvest. When he caught sight of them he strode across the field to greet them. ‘Ma’am,’ he said to Sylvie, removing his cap and wiping the sweat off his forehead with a big red and white spotted handkerchief. Tiny pieces of chaff were stuck to his arms. Like the chaff, the hairs on his arms were golden from the sun. ‘It’s hot,’ he said unnecessarily. He looked at Sylvie from beneath the long lock of hair that always fell in his handsome blue eyes. Sylvie appeared to blush.

As well as their own lunch – bloater paste sandwiches, lemon curd sandwiches, ginger beer and seed cake – they had carried the remains of yesterday’s pork pie that Mrs Glover had sent for George, along with a little jar of her famous piccalilli. The seed cake was already stale because Bridget had forgotten to put it back in the cake tin and it was left out in the warm kitchen overnight. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the ants had laid eggs in it,’ Mrs Glover said. When it came to eating it, Ursula had to pick out the seeds, which were legion, checking each one to make sure it wasn’t an ant egg.

The workers in the field stopped to have their lunch, bread and cheese and beer mainly. Bridget turned red and giggled as she handed over the pork pie to George. Pamela told Ursula that Maurice said Bridget had a pash on George, although it seemed to both of them that Maurice was an unlikely source of information on affairs of the heart. They ate their picnic at the edge of the stubble, George sprawled casually as he took great horse-sized bites out of the pork pie, Bridget gazing at him in admiration as if he were a Greek god, while Sylvie fussed with the baby.

Sylvie traipsed off to find a discreet spot in order to feed Teddy. Girls brought up in nice houses in Mayfair did not generally duck behind hedges to suckle infants. Like Hibernian peasants, no doubt. She thought fondly of the beach hut in Cornwall. By the time she found a suitable covert in the lee of a hedge, Teddy was bawling his head off, little pugilistic fists clenched against the injustice of the world. Just as he settled at the breast she happened to glance up and caught sight of George Glover coming out of the trees at the far end of the field. Spotting her, he stopped, staring at her like a startled deer. For a second he didn’t move but then he doffed his cap and said, ‘Still hot, ma’am.’

‘It certainly is,’ Sylvie said briskly and then watched as George Glover hastened towards the five-bar gate that broke the hedgerow in the middle of the field and leapt over it as easily as a big hunter over a hurdle.

From a safe distance they watched the enormous harvester noisily eating the wheat. ‘Hypnotic, isn’t it?’ Bridget said. She had recently learned the word. Sylvie took out her pretty little gold fob watch, an article much coveted by Pamela, and said, ‘Heavens above, look at the time,’ although none of them did. ‘We must be getting back.’

Just as they were leaving, George Glover shouted, ‘Heyathere!’ and cantered towards them across the field. He was carrying something cuddled in his cap. Two baby rabbits. ‘Oh,’ Pamela said, tearful with excitement.

‘Conies,’ George Glover said. ‘All huddled up in the middle of the field. Their mother gone. Take them, why don’t you? One each.’

On the way home, Pamela carried both baby rabbits in her pinafore, holding it out proudly in front of her like Bridget with a tea-tray.

‘Look at you,’ Hugh said when they walked wearily through the garden gate. ‘Golden and kissed by the sun. You look like real countrywomen.’

‘More red than gold, I’m afraid,’ Sylvie said ruefully.

The gardener was at work. He was called Old Tom (‘Like a cat,’ Sylvie said. ‘Do you think he was once called Young Tom?’). He worked six days a week, sharing his time between them and another house nearby. These neighbours, the Coles, addressed him as ‘Mr Ridgely’. He gave no indication which he preferred. The Coles lived in a very similar house to the Todds’ and Mr Cole, like Hugh, was a banker. ‘Jewish,’ Sylvie said in the same voice she would use for ‘Catholic’ – intrigued yet unsettled by such exoticism.

‘I don’t think they practise,’ Hugh said. Practise what, Ursula wondered? Pamela had to practise her piano scales every evening before tea, a plinking and plonking that wasn’t very pleasant to listen to.

Mr Cole had been born with a quite different name, according to their eldest son, Simon, something far too complicated for English tongues. The middle son, Daniel, was friends with Maurice, for although the grown-ups weren’t friends the children were familiar with each other. Simon, ‘a swot’ (Maurice said), helped Maurice every Monday evening with his maths. Sylvie was unsure how to reward him for this disagreeable task, perplexed seemingly by his Jewishness. ‘Perhaps I might give him something that would offend them?’ she speculated. ‘If I give money they might think I’m referring to their well-known reputation for miserliness. If I give sweets they might not fit their dietary strictures.’

‘They don’t practise,’ Hugh repeated. ‘They’re not observant.’

‘Benjamin’s very observant,’ Pamela said. ‘He found a blackbird’s nest yesterday.’ She glared at Maurice when she said this. He had come upon them marvelling at the beautiful eggs, blue and freckled brown, and had grabbed them and cracked them open on a stone. He thought it was a great joke. Pamela threw a small (well, smallish) rock at him that hit him on the head. ‘There,’ she said. ‘How does it feel to have your shell broken open?’ Now he had a nasty cut and a bruise on his temple. ‘Fell,’ he said shortly when Sylvie enquired how he came by the injury. He would, by nature, have told on Pamela, but the initial sin would have come to light and Sylvie would have punished him soundly for breaking the eggs. She had caught him stealing eggs before now and had boxed his ears. Sylvie said they should ‘revere’ nature, not destroy it, but reverence was not in Maurice’s own nature, unfortunately.

‘He’s learning the violin, isn’t he – Simon?’ Sylvie said. ‘Jews are usually very musical, aren’t they? Perhaps I could give him some sheet music, something like that.’ This discussion of the perils of offending Judaism had taken place around the breakfast table. Hugh always looked vaguely startled to find his children at the same table as him. He hadn’t eaten breakfast with his parents until he was twelve years old and deemed fit to leave the nursery. He was the robust graduate of an efficient nanny, a household within a household in Hampstead. The infant Sylvie, on the other hand, had dined late, on Canard à la presse, perched precariously on cushions, lulled by flickering candles and twinkling silverware, while her parents’ conversation floated above her head. It was not, she now suspected, an entirely regular childhood.

Old Tom was double-digging a trench, he said, for a new asparagus bed. Hugh had long since abandoned Wisden and had been picking raspberries to fill a big white enamel bowl that both Pamela and Ursula recognized as the one that Maurice had until recently been keeping tadpoles in, although neither of them mentioned this fact. Pouring himself a glass of beer, Hugh said, ‘Thirsty work, this agricultural labour,’ and they all laughed. Except for Old Tom.

Mrs Glover came out to demand that Old Tom dig up some potatoes to go with her beef collops. She huffed and puffed at the sight of the rabbits, ‘Not enough even for a stew.’ Pamela screamed and had to be calmed down with a sip of Hugh’s beer.

Pamela and Ursula made a nest, in a lost corner of the garden, out of grass and cotton wool, decorated with fallen rose petals, and carefully placed the baby rabbits in it. Pamela sang them a lullaby, she could keep a tune nicely, but they had been asleep ever since George Glover had handed them over.

‘I think they might be too small,’ Sylvie said. Too small for what? Ursula wondered but Sylvie didn’t say.

They sat on the lawn and ate the raspberries with cream and sugar. Hugh looked up into the blue, blue sky and said, ‘Did you hear that thunder? There’s going to be a tremendous storm, I can feel it coming. Can’t you, Old Tom?’ he raised his voice so that Old Tom, far away in the vegetable bed, could hear. Hugh believed that, as a gardener, Old Tom must know about weather. Old Tom said nothing and carried on digging.

‘He’s deaf,’ Hugh said.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Sylvie said, making a Rose Madder by mashing raspberries, beautiful like blood, into thick cream, and she thought, unexpectedly, about George Glover. A son of the soil. His strong square hands, his beautiful dappled greys, like big rocking horses, and the way he had lolled on the grassy bank eating his lunch, posed rather like Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel but reaching for another slice of pork pie rather than the hand of his Creator. (When Sylvie had accompanied her father, Llewellyn, to Italy she had been astonished by the amount of male flesh available to view as art.) She imagined feeding George Glover apples from her hand and laughed.

‘What?’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘What a handsome boy George Glover is.’

‘He must be adopted then,’ Hugh said.

In bed that night Sylvie abandoned Forster for less cerebral pursuits, entwining overheated limbs in the marital bed, more a panting hart than a soaring lark. She found herself thinking not of Hugh’s smooth, wiry body but of the great burnished centaureal limbs of George Glover. ‘You’re very …’ a spent Hugh said, gazing at the bedroom cornice as he searched for an appropriate word. ‘Lively,’ he concluded finally.

‘It must be all that fresh air,’ Sylvie said.

Golden and kissed by the sun, she thought as she drifted comfortably off to sleep and then Shakespeare came unwontedly to mind. Golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust, and she felt suddenly afraid.

‘There’s the storm rolling in at last,’ Hugh said. ‘Shall I turn out the light?’

Sylvie and Hugh were ejected from their Sunday-morning slumber by a wailing Pamela. She and Ursula had woken early with excitement and rushed outside to find that the rabbits had disappeared, only the fluffy pom-pom of one tiny tail remaining, white smudged with red.

‘Foxes,’ Mrs Glover said, with some satisfaction. ‘What did you expect?’