Life after life

September 1923

‘AND SO YOU don’t see Dr Kellet at all now?’ Izzie asked, snapping open her enamelled cigarette case and displaying a neat row of Black Russian cigarettes. ‘Gasper?’ she offered, holding out the case. Izzie addressed everyone as if they were the same age as herself. It was both seductive and lazy.

‘I’m thirteen years old,’ Ursula said. Which as far as she could see answered both questions.

‘Thirteen is quite grown-up nowadays. And life can be very short, you know,’ Izzie added, taking out a long ebony and ivory cigarette holder. She cast vaguely around the restaurant for a waiter to produce a light. ‘I rather miss those little visits of yours to London. Chaperoning you to Harley Street and then on to the Savoy for tea. A treat for both of us.’

‘I haven’t seen Dr Kellet for over a year,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m considered cured.’

‘Jolly good. I, on the other hand, am considered by la famille to be incurable. You are, of course, a jeune fille bien élevée and will never know what it is like to be the scapegoat for everyone else’s sins.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I have an idea.’

It was Saturday lunchtime and they were in Simpson’s. ‘Ladies at leisure,’ Izzie said, over great slices of bloody beef carved off the bone before their eyes. Millie’s mother, Mrs Shawcross, was a vegetarian and Ursula imagined her horror at the sight of the great haunch of meat. Hugh called Mrs Shawcross (Roberta) ‘a Bohemian’, Mrs Glover called her mad.

Izzie leaned towards the young waiter who had scurried over to light her cigarette. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she murmured, gazing directly up into his eyes in a way that made him grow suddenly as pink as the roast beef on her plate. ‘Le rosbif,’ she said to Ursula, dismissing the waiter with an indifferent flap of her hand. She was always peppering her conversation with French words (‘I spent some time in Paris when I was younger. And, of course, the war …’). ‘Do you speak French?’

‘Well, we do it at school,’ Ursula said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can speak it.’

‘You’re a droll little thing, aren’t you?’ Izzie inhaled deeply on her cigarette holder and then puckered up her (astonishingly) red cupid’s bow as if she were about to play the trumpet before exhaling a stream of smoke. Several men seated nearby turned to stare at her in fascination. She winked at Ursula. ‘I bet the first French words you learned were déjà vu. Poor old thing. Maybe you were dropped on your head as a baby. I expect I was. Come on, let’s tuck in, I’m ravenous, aren’t you? I’m supposed to be banting but really there’s only so much one can take,’ Izzie said, cutting enthusiastically into the beef.

This was an improvement, when she had met Ursula on the platform at Marylebone Izzie had looked green and said she was ‘a tad queasy’ on account of the oysters and rum (‘never a good combination’) after a ‘disreputable’ night in a club in Jermyn Street. Now, oysters apparently forgotten, she was eating as if she were starving even though she claimed, as usual, to be ‘watching her figure’. She also claimed to be ‘stony broke’ yet was wildly extravagant with her money. ‘What’s life worth if you can’t have some fun?’ she said. (‘Her life is nothing but fun as far as I can see,’ Hugh grumbled.)

Fun – and the concomitant treats – were necessary, Izzie claimed, to sweeten the fact that she had now ‘joined the ranks of the workers’, and had to ‘pound away’ on a typewriter to earn her keep. ‘Goodness, you would think she was hewing coal,’ Sylvie said crossly after a rare and rather embattled family luncheon at Fox Corner. After Izzie had gone, Sylvie banged down the Worcester fruit plates she was helping Bridget to clear and said, ‘All she’s doing is producing drivel, which is something she’s been doing since she first learned to talk.’

‘Heirlooms,’ Hugh murmured, rescuing the Worcester.

Izzie had managed to get a job (‘God knows how,’ Hugh said) writing a weekly column for a newspaper – Adventures of a Modern Spinster, the column was called – on the subject of being a ‘singleton’. ‘Everyone knows that there simply aren’t enough men to go round any more,’ she said, tearing into a bread roll at Fox Corner’s Regency Revival dining table. (‘You don’t seem to have any trouble finding them,’ Hugh muttered.) ‘The poor boys are all dead,’ Izzie continued, ignoring him. Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labour of the cow. ‘There’s nothing can be done about it, we have to move on as best we can without them. The modern woman must fend for herself without the prospect of the succour of hearth and home. She must learn to be independent, emotionally, financially and, most importantly, in her spirit.’ (‘Rot.’ Hugh again.) ‘The men are not the only ones who had to sacrifice themselves in the Great War.’ (‘They’re dead, you’re not, that’s the difference.’ This from Sylvie. Coldly.)

‘Of course,’ Izzie said, mindful of Mrs Glover at her elbow with a tureen of Brown Windsor, ‘the women of the lower classes have always known what it is to work.’ Mrs Glover gave her a baleful look and tightened her grip on the soup ladle. (‘Brown Windsor, how delicious, Mrs Glover. What do you put in it to make it taste this way? Really? How interesting.’) ‘We’re moving towards a classless society, of course,’ a remark directed at Hugh but which earned a snort of derision from an unappeased Mrs Glover.

‘Are you a Bolshevik this week then?’ Hugh asked.

‘We’re all Bolsheviks now,’ Izzie said blithely.

‘And at my table!’ Hugh said and laughed.

‘She’s such a fool,’ Sylvie said when Izzie had finally departed for the station. ‘And so much make-up! You would think she was on the stage. Of course, in her head she’s always on the stage. She is her own theatre.’

‘The hair,’ Hugh said regretfully. It went without saying that Izzie had bobbed her hair before anyone else they knew. Hugh had expressly forbidden the women in his family to cut their hair. Almost as soon as he had issued this paternal edict the normally unrebellious Pamela had gone into town with Winnie Shawcross and the pair of them had returned shingled and shorn. (‘It’s just easier for games’ was Pamela’s rational explanation.) Pamela had saved her heavy plaits, whether as relics or trophies, it was hard to say. ‘Mutiny in the ranks, eh?’ Hugh said. Neither of them being the argumentative sort, that was the end of the conversation. The plaits now lived at the back of Pamela’s underwear drawer. ‘You never know, they might come in useful for something,’ she said. No one in the family could imagine what that something might be.

Sylvie’s feelings about Izzie went deeper than hair or make-up. She had never forgiven Izzie for the baby. He would be thirteen now, the same age as Ursula. ‘A little Fritz or Hans,’ she said. ‘My own children’s blood running through his veins. But, of course, the only thing of any interest to Izzie is Izzie.’

‘Still, she can’t be entirely shallow,’ Hugh said. ‘I expect she saw some awful things in the war.’ As if he hadn’t.

Sylvie tossed her head. There might have been a halo of gnats around her own lovely hair. She was rather envious of Izzie’s war, even the awfulness. ‘She’s still a fool,’ she said and Hugh laughed and said, ‘Yes, she is.’

Izzie’s column seemed for the most part to be nothing more than a diary of her own hectic personal life with the odd social comment thrown in. Last week it had been ‘How high can they go?’ and was about ‘the rise of the emancipated female hemline’, but consisted mostly of Izzie’s tips to acquire the necessary shapely ankles. Stand backwards, on tiptoe, on the bottom step of a staircase and let your heels drop over the edge. Pamela practised all week on the attic staircase and declared no improvement at all.

Much against his will, Hugh felt it necessary to buy Izzie’s news paper every Friday and read it on the train home, ‘just to keep an eye on what she’s saying’ (and then jettison the offending item on the hall table, from where Pamela was able to rescue it). Hugh harboured a particular horror that Izzie would write about him and his only comfort was that she wrote under the pseudonym Delphine Fox, which was ‘the silliest name’ that Sylvie had ever heard. ‘Well,’ Hugh said, ‘Delphine is her middle name, from her godmother. And Todd is an old word for fox, so I suppose there is some logic in it. Not that I’m defending her.’

‘But it’s my name, it’s on my birth certificate,’ Izzie said, looking hurt when attacked over the pre-prandial decanter. ‘And it’s from Delphi, you know, the oracle, and so on. So rather fitting, I would have said.’ (‘She’s an oracle now?’ from Sylvie. ‘If she’s an oracle then I’m the high priestess of Tutankhamun.’)

Izzie, in the person of Delphine, had already on more than one occasion mentioned ‘my two nephews’ (‘Terrific rascals, both of them!’) but had not cited any names. ‘So far,’ Hugh said darkly. She had made up a few ‘amusing anecdotes’ about these clearly fictional nephews. Maurice was eighteen (Izzie’s ‘sturdy little chaps’ were nine and eleven), still away at boarding school and had spent no more than ten minutes in Izzie’s company in as many years. As for Teddy, he tended to avoid situations that might evolve into anecdotes.

‘Who are these boys?’ Sylvie quizzed over Mrs Glover’s surprisingly capricious interpretation of sole Véronique. She had the folded newspaper on the table next to her and tapped Izzie’s column with her forefinger as if it might be impregnated with germs. ‘Are they supposed to be based in some way on Maurice and Teddy?’

‘What about Jimmy?’ Teddy said to Izzie. ‘Why don’t you write about him?’ Jimmy, perky in a sky-blue knitted jumper, was spooning mashed potato into his mouth and didn’t look too bothered about being written out of great literature. He was a child of the peace, the war to end all wars had, after all, been fought for Jimmy. Yet again, Sylvie claimed to be taken by surprise by the newest addition to the family (‘Four had seemed like the complete set’). Once, Sylvie had had no idea how children were started, now she seemed uncertain as to how you might stop them. (‘Jimmy’s an afterthought, I suppose,’ Sylvie said.

‘I wasn’t thinking much,’ Hugh said and they both laughed and Sylvie said, ‘Really, Hugh.’)

Jimmy’s arrival had the effect of making Ursula feel as if she was being pushed further away from the heart of the family, like an object at the edge of an overcrowded table. A cuckoo, she had overheard Sylvie say to Hugh. Ursula’s a bit of an awkward cuckoo. But how could you be a cuckoo in your own nest? ‘You are my real mother, aren’t you?’ she asked Sylvie and Sylvie laughed and said, ‘Incontrovertibly, dear.’

‘The odd one out,’ she said to Dr Kellet.

‘Well, there always has to be one,’ he said.

‘Don’t write about my children, Isobel,’ Sylvie said heatedly to Izzie.

‘They’re imaginary, for heaven’s sake, Sylvie.’

‘Don’t even write about my imaginary children.’ She lifted the tablecloth and peered at the floor. ‘What are you doing with your feet?’ she said testily to Pamela, who was sitting opposite her.

‘I’m making circles with my ankles,’ Pamela said, unconcerned by Sylvie’s irritability. Pamela was quite bold these days but also rather reasonable, a combination that seemed designed to annoy Sylvie. (‘You are so like your father,’ she had said to Pamela only this morning over some trifling difference of opinion. ‘But why would that be a bad thing?’ Pamela said.) Pamela wiped gluey potato from Jimmy’s pink cheeks and said, ‘Clockwise, then anti-clockwise. It’s the way to a shapely ankle, according to Aunt Izzie.’

‘Izzie is not a person from whom anyone with any sense would take advice.’ (‘Excuse me?’ Izzie said.) ‘Besides which, you’re too young for shapely ankles.’

‘Well,’ Pamela said, ‘I’m nearly the same age as you were when you married Daddy.’

‘Oh, splendid,’ Hugh said, relieved at the sight of Mrs Glover waiting in the doorway to make a grand entrance with a Riz impératrice. ‘The ghost of Escoffier is at your back today, Mrs Glover.’ Mrs Glover couldn’t help but glance behind her.

‘Oh, splendid,’ Izzie said. ‘A cabinet pudding. You can rely on Simpson’s for nursery food. We had a nursery, you know, it took up the whole top floor of the house.’

‘In Hampstead? Grandmama’s house?’

‘The very same. I was the baby. Like Jimmy.’ Izzie wilted a little, as if she were remembering some hitherto long-forgotten sadness. The ostrich feather on her hat trembled in sympathy. She revived at the sight of the silver sauce-boat of custard. ‘And so you don’t have those odd feelings any more? The déjà vu and so on?’

‘Me?’ Ursula said. ‘No. Sometimes. Not so much, I suppose. It was before, you know. Now it’s gone. Sort of.’ Had it? She was never sure. Her memories seemed like a cascade of echoes. Could echoes cascade? Perhaps not. She had tried (and largely failed) to learn to be precise with language under Dr Kellet’s guidance. She missed that cosy hour (tête-à-tête, he called it. More French) on a Thursday afternoon. She was ten years old when she first went to see him and had enjoyed being liberated from Fox Corner, in the company of someone who gave his full attention to her and only her. Sylvie, or more often than not Bridget, put Ursula on the train and she was met at the other end by Izzie even though both Sylvie and Hugh doubted that Izzie was sufficiently reliable to be in charge of a child. (‘Expediency,’ Izzie said to Hugh, ‘generally trumps ethics, I’ve noticed. Personally, if I had a ten-year-old child I don’t think I would feel entirely comfortable allowing it to travel all on its own.’ ‘You do have a ten-year-old child,’ Hugh pointed out. The little Fritz. ‘Couldn’t we try and find him?’ Sylvie asked. ‘Needle in a haystack,’ Hugh said. ‘The Hun are legion.’)

‘So I rather miss seeing you,’ Izzie said, ‘which is why I asked if you could come up for the day. To be frank, I was surprised Sylvie agreed. There’s always been a certain, shall we say, froideur between your mother and myself. I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know. Anyway I thought I should try to single you out from the herd, as it were. You remind me a little of me.’ (Was that a good thing, Ursula wondered?) ‘We could be special chums, what do you think? Pamela’s a little dull,’ Izzie continued. ‘All that tennis and cycling, no wonder she has such sturdy ankles. Très sportive, I’m sure, but still. And science! No fun in that. And the boys are, well … boys, but you’re interesting, Ursula. All that funny stuff in your head about knowing the future. Quite the little clairvoyant. Perhaps we should set you up in a gypsy caravan, get you a crystal ball, Tarot cards. The drowned Phoenician sailor and all that. You can’t see anything in my future, can you?’

‘No.’

‘Reincarnation,’ Dr Kellet had said to her. ‘Have you heard of that?’ Ursula, aged ten, shook her head. She had heard of very little. Dr Kellet had a nice set of rooms in Harley Street. The one that he showed Ursula into was half panelled in mellow oak, with a thick carpet figured in red and blue on the floor and two large leather armchairs either side of a well-stoked coal fire. Dr Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelt of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, ‘So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?’ (Oh, that’s why I’m here, Ursula thought.)

He offered her tea which he brewed in something called a samovar in the corner of the room. ‘Although I’m not Russian, far from it, I’m from Maidstone, I visited St Petersburg before the Revolution.’ He was like Izzie in that he treated you as a grown-up, or at least he appeared to, but that was where the resemblance ended. The tea was black and bitter and only drinkable with the aid of heaps of sugar and the contents of the tin of Huntley and Palmer’s Marie biscuits that sat between them on a little table.

He had trained in Vienna (‘where else?’) but trod, he said, his own path. He was no one’s disciple, he said, although he had studied ‘at the feet of all of the teachers. One must nose forward,’ he said. ‘Nudge one’s way through the chaos of our thoughts. Unite the divided self.’ Ursula had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The maid? You pushed her down the stairs?’ It seemed a very direct question for someone who talked about nosing and nudging.

‘It was an accident.’ She didn’t think of Bridget as ‘the maid’, she thought of her as Bridget. And it was ages ago now.

‘Your mother is worried about you.’

‘I just want you to be happy, darling,’ Sylvie said after she had made the appointment with Dr Kellet.

‘Aren’t I happy?’ Ursula puzzled.

‘What do you think?’

Ursula didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

‘As if there is another world?’ Dr Kellet said.

‘Yes. But it’s this one as well.’

(‘I know she says the oddest things, but a psychiatrist?’ Hugh said to Sylvie. He frowned. ‘She’s only small. She’s not defective.’

‘Of course not. She just needs a little fixing.’)

‘And, hey presto, you’re fixed! How marvellous,’ Izzie said. ‘He was an odd little bod, that mind doctor, wasn’t he? Shall we essay the cheese board – the Stilton’s so ripe it looks as if it’s about to walk away of its own accord – or shall we tootle off and go to mine?’

‘I’m stuffed,’ Ursula said.

‘Me too. Tootle off it is then. Shall I pick up the bill?’

‘I have no money. I’m thirteen,’ Ursula reminded her.

They left the restaurant and, to Ursula’s astonishment, Izzie sauntered a few yards up the Strand and climbed into the driver’s seat of a gleaming open-top car, parked, rather carelessly, outside the Coal Hole. ‘You have a car!’ Ursula exclaimed.

‘Good, isn’t it? Not exactly paid for. Hop in. A Sunbeam, sports model. Certainly beats driving an ambulance. Wonderful in this weather. Shall we take the scenic route, go along the Embankment?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Ah, the Thames,’ Izzie said when the river came into view. ‘The nymphs, sadly, are all departed.’ It was a lovely late-September afternoon, crisp as an apple. ‘London’s glorious, isn’t it?’ Izzie said. She drove as if she were on the circuit at Brooklands. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. Ursula supposed that if Izzie had managed to drive throughout the war unscathed then they would probably make it along the Victoria Embankment without coming to grief.

As they approached Westminster Bridge they had to slow down on account of the crowds of people whose flow had been interrupted by a largely silent demonstration of unemployed men. I fought overseas, a placard held aloft read. Another proclaimed Hungry and wanting to work. ‘They’re so meek,’ Izzie said dismissively. ‘There’ll never be a revolution in this country. Not another one at any rate. We chopped the head off a king once and felt so guilty about it that we’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.’ A shabby-looking man came up alongside the car and shouted something incomprehensible at Izzie, although the meaning was clear.

‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,’ Izzie murmured. ‘You know she never said that, don’t you? Marie-Antoinette? She’s a rather maligned figure in history. You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.’ It was hard to figure out whether Izzie was a royalist or a republican. ‘Best not to adhere too closely to one side or the other really,’ she said.

Big Ben tolled a solemn three o’clock as the Sunbeam pushed its way through the throng. ‘Si lunga tratta di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta. Have you read Dante? You should. He’s very good.’ How did Izzie know so much? ‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘Finishing school. And I spent some time in Italy after the war. I took a lover, of course. An impoverished count, it’s more or less de rigueur when you’re over there. Are you shocked?’

‘No.’ She was. Ursula wasn’t surprised there was a froideur between her mother and Izzie.

‘Reincarnation is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy,’ Dr Kellet would say, sucking on his meerschaum pipe. All conversations with Dr Kellet were punctuated by this object, whether by gesture – a great deal of pointing with both mouthpiece and Turk’s-head bowl (fascinating in itself) – or the necessary ritual of emptying, filling, tamping, lighting and so on. ‘Have you heard of Buddhism?’ She hadn’t.

‘How old are you?’

‘Ten.’

‘Still quite new. Perhaps you’re remembering another life. Of course, the disciples of the Buddha don’t believe that you keep coming back as the same person in the same circumstances, as you feel you do. You move on, up or down, sideways occasionally, I expect. Nirvana is the goal. Non-being, as it were.’ At ten it seemed to Ursula that perhaps being should be the goal. ‘Most ancient religions,’ he continued, ‘adhered to an idea of circularity – the snake with its tail in its mouth, and so on.’

‘I’ve been confirmed,’ she said, trying to be helpful. ‘Church of England.’

Dr Kellet had come to Sylvie recommended by Mrs Shawcross via Major Shawcross, their next-door neighbour. Kellet had done a lot of good work, the major said, with men who ‘needed help’ after they returned from the war (there was a suggestion that the major himself had ‘needed help’). Ursula’s path crossed occasionally with some of these other patients. Once there was a dejected young man who stared at the carpet in the waiting room speaking quietly to himself, another who tapped his foot restlessly in time to something only he could hear. Dr Kellet’s receptionist, Mrs Duckworth, who was a war widow and had been a nurse during the war, was always very nice to Ursula, offering her peppermints and asking her about her family. One day a man blundered into the waiting room, although the doorbell downstairs had never rung. He looked bewildered and a little wild but he just stood stock-still in the middle of the room, staring at Ursula as if he’d never seen a child before, until Mrs Duckworth led him to a chair and sat down next to him and then put her arm round him and said, ‘Now, now, Billy what is it?’ the way a nice mother would have done and Billy laid his head on her chest and began to sob.

If Teddy ever cried when he was younger, Ursula could never bear it. It seemed to open up a chasm inside, something deep and dreadful and full of sorrow. All she ever wanted was to make sure he never felt like crying again. The man in Dr Kellet’s waiting room had the same effect on her. (‘That’s how motherhood feels every day,’ Sylvie said.)

Dr Kellet came out of his room at that moment and said, ‘Come along, Ursula, I’ll see to Billy later,’ but when Ursula finished her appointment Billy was no longer in the waiting room. ‘Poor man,’ Mrs Duckworth said sadly.

The war, Dr Kellet said to Ursula, had made many people search for meaning in new places – ‘Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense of their loss.’ Dr Kellet himself had sacrificed a son, Guy, a captain in the Royal West Surreys, lost at Arras. ‘One must hold on to the idea of sacrifice, Ursula. It can be a higher calling.’ He showed her a photograph, not one taken in uniform, just a snapshot really, of a boy in cricket whites, standing proudly behind his bat. ‘Could have played for the county,’ Dr Kellet said sadly. ‘I like to think of him – of all of them – playing a never-ending game in heaven. A perfect afternoon in June, always just before they break for tea.’

It seemed a shame for all the young men never to have their tea. Bosun was in heaven, along with Sam Wellington, the old boot, and Clarence Dodds, who had died with astonishing speed of the Spanish flu the day after the Armistice. Ursula couldn’t imagine any of them playing cricket.

‘Of course, I don’t believe in God,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But I believe in heaven. One has to,’ he added, rather bleakly. Ursula wondered how all of this was supposed to fix her.

‘From a more scientific point of view,’ he said, ‘perhaps the part of your brain responsible for memory has a little flaw, a neurological problem that leads you to think that you are repeating experiences. As if something had got stuck.’ She wasn’t really dying and being reborn, he said, she just thought she was. Ursula couldn’t see what the difference was. Was she stuck? And if so, where?

‘But we don’t want it to result in you killing the poor servants, do we?’

‘But it was such a long time ago,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve tried to kill anyone since.’

‘Down in the dumps,’ Sylvie said at their first meeting with Dr Kellet, the only time she had been to the Harley Street rooms with Ursula although she had clearly already talked to him without Ursula. Ursula wondered very much what had been said about her. ‘And she’s rather forlorn all the time,’ Sylvie continued. ‘I can understand an adult feeling like that—’

‘Can you?’ Dr Kellet said, leaning forward, the meerschaum indicating interest. ‘Do you?’

‘I’m not the problem,’ Sylvie said with her most gracious smile.

I’m a problem, Ursula thought? And anyway she hadn’t been killing Bridget, she was saving her. And if she wasn’t saving her perhaps she was sacrificing her. Hadn’t Dr Kellet himself said sacrifice was a higher calling?

‘If I were you I would stick to traditional moral guidelines,’ he said. ‘Fate isn’t in your hands. That would be a very heavy burden for a little girl.’ He got up from his chair and put another shovel of coal on the fire.

‘There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But, of course, there are some situations where it’s impossible to imagine anything worse.’ Ursula supposed he was thinking of Guy, lost at Arras and then denied his tea and cucumber sandwiches for eternity.

‘Try this,’ Izzie said, squirting a perfume atomizer in Ursula’s direction. ‘Chanel Number 5. It’s quite the thing. She’s quite the thing. Her strange, synthetic perfumes.’ She laughed as if she had made a great joke and sprayed another invisible cloud around the bathroom. It was quite different from the flowery scents that Sylvie anointed herself with.

They had finally arrived at Izzie’s flat in Basil Street (‘rather a dull endroit but handy for Harrods’). Izzie’s bathroom was pink and black marble (‘I designed it myself, delicious, isn’t it?’) and was all sharp lines and hard corners. Ursula hated to think what would happen if you slipped and fell in here.

Everything in the flat seemed to be new and shiny. It was nothing like Fox Corner, where the slow-seeming tick of the grandfather clock in the hall counted time and the patina of years shone on the parquet floors. The Meissen figures with their missing fingers and chipped toes, the Staffordshire dogs with accidentally lopped-off ears, bore no resemblance to the Bakelite bookends and onyx ashtrays in Izzie’s rooms. In Basil Street everything looked so new it seemed to belong in a shop. Even the books were new, novels and volumes of essays and poetry by writers Ursula had never heard of. ‘One must keep up with the times,’ Izzie said.

Ursula regarded herself in the bathroom mirror. Izzie stood behind her, Mephistopheles to her Faustus, and said, ‘Goodness, you’re turning out to be quite pretty,’ before rearranging her hair into different styles. ‘You must have it cut,’ she said, ‘you should come to my coiffeur. He’s really very good. You’re in danger of looking like a milkmaid, when really I think you’re going to turn out to be deliciously wicked.’

Izzie danced around the bedroom singing I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate. ‘Can you shimmy? Look, it’s easy.’ It wasn’t and they collapsed in laughter on the satin eiderdown of the bed. ‘Gort to ’ave fun, ’aven’t yew?’ Izzie said in an atrocious mock-Cockney accent. The bedroom was a terrible mess, clothes everywhere, satin petticoats, crêpe de Chine nightdresses, silk stockings, partnerless shoes lying abandoned on the carpet, a dusting of Coty powder over everything. ‘You can try things on if you want,’ Izzie said carelessly. ‘Although you’re rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite.’ Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

‘What shall we do?’ Izzie said, suddenly bored. ‘We could play cards? Bezique?’ She danced through to the living room and tripped her way towards a large shining chrome object that looked as if it belonged on the bridge of an ocean liner and turned out to be a cocktail cabinet. ‘A drink?’ She looked doubtfully at Ursula. ‘No, don’t tell me, you’re only thirteen.’ She sighed, lit a cigarette and looked at the clock. ‘We’re too late to catch a matinee, too early for an evening performance. London Calling! is on at the Duke of York’s, it’s supposed to be very amusing. We could go, you could get a later train home.’

Ursula fingered the keys on the Royal typewriter that sat on a desk at the window. ‘My trade,’ Izzie said. ‘Perhaps I should put you in this week’s column.’

‘Really? What would you say?’

‘I don’t know, make something up, I expect,’ she said. ‘That’s what writers do.’ She took out a record from the cabinet of the gramophone and put it on the turntable. ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘You’ve never heard anything like it.’

It was true, she hadn’t. It started with a piano, but nothing like the Chopin and Liszt that Sylvie played so nicely (and Pamela in such a pedestrian fashion).

‘They call it honky-tonk, I believe,’ Izzie said. A woman began to sing, raw and American. She sounded as if she had spent her life in a prison cell. ‘Ida Cox,’ Izzie said. ‘She’s a Negress. Isn’t she extraordinary?’

She was.

‘Singing about how wretched it is to be a woman,’ Izzie said, lighting up another cigarette and sucking hard. ‘If only one could find someone really filthy rich to marry. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. Do you know who said that? No? Well you should.’ She was suddenly irritable, a not completely domesticated animal. The phone rang and she said, ‘Saved by the bell,’ and proceeded to have a feverishly animated conversation with the unseen, unheard caller. She ended the call by saying, ‘That would be delish, darling, meet you in half an hour.’ And to Ursula, ‘I would offer you a lift but I’m going to Claridge’s and it’s simply miles from Marylebone and after that I have a party to go to in Lowndes Square so I can’t possibly see you to the station. You can Tube it to Marylebone, can’t you? You know how? The Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and then change to the Bakerloo to Marylebone. Come on, I’ll walk out with you.’

When they reached the street Izzie breathed deeply as if she’d been released from unwanted confinement. ‘Ah, twilight,’ she said. ‘The violet hour. Lovely, isn’t it?’ She kissed Ursula on the cheek and said, ‘It was marvellous seeing you, we have to do this again. Are you all right from here? Tout droit on to Sloane Street, turn left and Bob’s your uncle, there’s Knightsbridge Tube station. Toodle-oo then.’

‘Amor fati,’ Dr Kellet said, ‘have you heard of that?’ It sounded like he had said, ‘A more fatty.’ Ursula was puzzled – both herself and Dr Kellet were on the lean side. Nietzsche (‘a philosopher’), he said, was drawn to it. ‘A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good.’

‘Werde, der du bist, as he would have it,’ Dr Kellet continued, knocking the ashes from his pipe on to the hearth from where Ursula supposed someone else would sweep them up. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Ursula wondered how many ten-year-old girls Dr Kellet had actually encountered before. ‘It means become who you are,’ he said, adding more shreds of tobacco to the meerschaum. (The being before the non-being, Ursula supposed.) ‘Nietzsche got that from Pindar. . Do you know Greek?’ He had quite lost her now. ‘It means – become such as you are, having learned what that is.’

Ursula thought he said ‘from Pinner’, which was where Hugh’s old nanny had retired to, living with her sister above a shop in an old building on the high street. Hugh had driven Ursula and Teddy out there in his splendid Bentley one Sunday afternoon. Nanny Mills was rather frightening (although not to Hugh apparently), spending a lot of time quizzing Ursula about her manners and inspecting Teddy’s ears for dirt. Her sister was nicer and plied them with glasses of elderflower cordial and slices of milk fadge spread with blackberry jelly. ‘How is Isobel?’ Nanny Mills asked, her mouth set like a prune. ‘Izzie is Izzie,’ Hugh said, which if you repeated it very quickly, as Teddy did later, sounded like a small swarm of wasps. Izzie, apparently, had become herself a long time ago.

It seemed unlikely that Nietzsche had obtained anything from Pinner, least of all his beliefs.

‘Nice time with Izzie?’ Hugh asked when he picked her up from the station. There was something reassuring about the sight of Hugh in his grey homburg and long dark-blue wool overcoat. He scrutinized her for any visible change. She thought it best not to tell him that she had taken the Tube on her own. It had been a terrifying adventure, a dark night in the forest, but one which, like any good heroine, she had survived. Ursula shrugged. ‘We went to Simpson’s for lunch.’

‘Hm,’ Hugh said as if trying to decipher a meaning from this.

‘We listened to a Negress singing.’

‘In Simpson’s?’ Hugh puzzled.

‘On Izzie’s gramophone.’

‘Hm,’ again. He opened the car door for her and she settled into the lovely leathery seat of the Bentley, almost as reassuring as Hugh himself. Sylvie regarded the car as ‘ruinously’ extravagant. It was breathtakingly expensive. The war had made Sylvie parsimonious: slivers of soap were collected and boiled down for the laundry, sheets turned side to middle, hats refurbished. ‘We would live on eggs and chickens if she had her way,’ Hugh laughed. He, on the other hand, had become less prudent since the war, ‘perhaps not the best trait for a banker to develop’, Sylvie said. ‘Carpe diem,’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘You were never one for seizing.’

‘Izzie has a car now,’ Ursula offered. ‘Does she?’ Hugh said. ‘I’m sure it’s not as splendid as this beast.’ He patted the dashboard of the Bentley fondly. As they drove away from the station he said quietly, ‘She’s not to be trusted.’

‘Who?’ (Mother? The car?)

‘Izzie.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Ursula agreed.

‘How did you find her?’

‘Oh, you know. Incurable. Izzie is Izzie, after all.’

When they returned to the house they found Teddy and Jimmy playing a tidy game of dominos on the table in the morning room while Pamela was next door with Gertie Shawcross. Winnie was slightly older than Pamela and Gertie slightly younger and Pamela divided her time equally between them but rarely both at the same time. Ursula, devoted to Millie, found it an odd arrangement. Teddy loved all the Shawcross girls but his heart was in Nancy’s small hands.

Of Sylvie there was no sign. ‘Don’t know,’ Bridget said, rather indifferently, when Hugh enquired.

Mrs Glover had left them a rather utilitarian mutton stew keeping warm in the range. Mrs Glover no longer lived with them at Fox Corner. She rented a little house in the village so that she could look after George as well as them. George hardly ever left the house. Bridget referred to him as a ‘poor soul’ and it was hard to disagree with that description. If it was good weather (or even not particularly good weather at all) he sat in a big ugly bath-chair at the front door and watched the world pass him by. His handsome head (‘Leonine, once,’ Sylvie said sadly) hung down on his chest and a long thread of drool dangled from his mouth. ‘Poor devil,’ Hugh said. ‘Better off if he’d been killed.’

Sometimes one or other of them tagged along when Sylvie – or a more reluctant Bridget – visited him during the day. It seemed odd that they would go to his home to see him while his own mother stayed in their home looking after them. Sylvie would fuss with the blanket across his legs and fetch him a glass of beer and then wipe his mouth the way you did with Jimmy.

There were other war veterans in the neighbourhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge. (‘Ursula has morbid thoughts,’ she heard Sylvie say to Hugh. Ursula had become a great eavesdropper, it was the only way to find out what people were really thinking. She didn’t hear Hugh’s answer as Bridget came crashing into the room in a fury because the cat – Hattie, one of Queenie’s offspring, possessed of the same character as her mother – had stolen the poached salmon that was to have been their lunch.)

There were those, too, who, like the men in Dr Kellet’s waiting room, had less visible injuries. There was an ex-soldier in the village called Charles Chorley who had served with the Buffs and had come through the war without a scratch and then one day in the spring of 1921 he had stabbed his wife and three children where they lay sleeping in their beds and then shot himself in the head with a Mauser he had taken from a German soldier he had killed at Bapaume. (‘Terrible mess,’ Dr Fellowes reported. ‘These chaps should think about the people who have to clean up afterwards.’)

Bridget, of course, had her ‘own cross to bear’, having lost Clarence. Like Izzie, Bridget was resigned to spinsterhood although she embraced it in a less giddy fashion. They had all attended Clarence’s funeral, even Hugh. Mrs Dodds had been her usual restrained self and had flinched when Sylvie placed a comforting hand on her arm, but after they had shuffled away from the gaping hole of the grave (not a thing of beauty, not at all) Mrs Dodds said to Ursula, ‘Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up,’ and she put her finger to the corner of her eye and dabbed at a trace of moisture there – a tear would have been too generous a description. Ursula didn’t know why she had been chosen for this confidence, possibly simply because she was the nearest person. Certainly no response was expected, or received.

‘Ironic, one might say,’ Sylvie said, ‘for Clarence to have survived the war and to die of an illness.’ (‘What would I have done if one of you had caught the influenza?’ she often said.)

Ursula and Pamela had spent a considerable amount of time discussing whether Clarence had been buried with his mask on or off. (And if off, where might it be now?) They didn’t feel it was the kind of thing that they could ask Bridget. Bridget said bitterly that Old Mrs Dodds had finally got her son to herself and stopped another woman taking him away from her. (‘A little harsh, perhaps,’ Hugh murmured.) Clarence’s photograph, a print of the one taken for his mother, before Bridget knew him, before he marched off to his destiny, had now joined that of Sam Wellington in the shed. ‘The endless ranks of the dead,’ Sylvie said angrily. ‘Everyone wants to forget them.’

‘Well I certainly do,’ Hugh said.

Sylvie returned in time for Mrs Glover’s apple charlotte. Their own apples – a small orchard that Sylvie had planted at the end of the war was beginning to bear fruit. When Hugh wondered where she had been she said something indistinct about Gerrards Cross. She sat at the dining table and said, ‘I’m not really terribly hungry.’

Hugh caught her eye and, nodding in Ursula’s direction, said, ‘Izzie.’ An exquisite shorthand communication.

Ursula had expected an inquisition but all Sylvie said was ‘Good lord, I had quite forgotten that you had been to London. You’ve returned in one piece, I’m glad to see.’

‘Untainted,’ Ursula said brightly. ‘Do you, by the way, know who it was who said, A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of?’ Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie’s, was random yet far-ranging, ‘the sign that one has acquired one’s learning from novels, rather than an education’, according to Sylvie.

‘Austen,’ Sylvie said promptly. ‘Mansfield Park. She puts the words in Mary Crawford’s mouth, for whom she professes disdain, of course, but really I expect dear Aunt Jane rather believed those words. Why?’

Ursula shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Till I came to Mansfield, I had not imagined a country parson ever aspired to a shrubbery, or anything of the kind. Wonderful stuff. I always think the word shrubbery denotes a certain kind of person.’

‘We have a shrubbery,’ Hugh said but Sylvie ignored him and continued to Ursula, ‘You really should read Jane Austen. You’re surely the right age by now.’ Sylvie seemed quite gay, a mood somehow at odds with the mutton that was still sitting on the table in its dull brown pot, little ponds of white fat congealing on the surface. ‘Really,’ Sylvie said sharply, turning suddenly like the weather. ‘Standards are falling everywhere, even in one’s own home.’ Hugh raised his eyebrows and before Sylvie had a chance to call on Bridget he got up from the table and took the stew-pot back to the kitchen himself. Their little maid-of-all-work, Marjorie, no longer so little, had recently decamped and Bridget and Mrs Glover were left to shoulder the burden of looking after them. (‘It’s not as if we’re demanding in any way,’ Sylvie said crossly when Bridget mentioned that she hadn’t had a pay rise since the end of the war. ‘She should be grateful.’)

In bed that night – Ursula and Pamela still shared the cramped quarters of the attic bedroom (‘like prisoners in a cell’ according to Teddy) – Pamela said, ‘Why didn’t she invite me as well as you, or even instead of you?’ This, being Pamela, was said with genuine curiosity rather than malice.

‘She thinks I’m interesting.’

Pamela laughed and said, ‘She thinks Mrs Glover’s Brown Windsor is interesting.’

‘I know. I’m not flattered.’

‘It’s because you’re pretty and clever,’ Pamela said, ‘while I am merely clever.’

‘That’s not true and you know it,’ Ursula said, hotly defensive of Pamela.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘She says she’ll put me in her newspaper next week but I don’t suppose she will.’

Ursula, in her account to Pamela of the day’s adventures in London, had omitted a scene she had witnessed, unseen by Izzie, who had been preoccupied with turning the car round in the middle of the road outside the Coal Hole. A woman wearing a mink coat had come out of the entrance to the Savoy, on the arm of a rather elegant man. The woman was laughing in a carefree way at something the man had just said but then she broke away from his arm to search in her handbag for her purse in order to drop a handful of coins into the bowl of an ex-soldier who was sitting on the pavement. The man had no legs and was perched on some kind of makeshift wooden trolley. Ursula had seen another limbless man on a similar contraption outside Marylebone station. Indeed, the more she had looked on the London streets, the more amputees she had seen.

A doorman from the hotel darted out of Savoy Court and advanced on the legless man, who quickly scooted away using his hands as oars on the pavement. The woman who had given him money remonstrated with the doorman – Ursula could make out her handsome, impatient features – but then the elegant man took her gently by the elbow and guided her away up the Strand. The remarkable thing about this scene was not the content but the characters. Ursula had never seen the elegant man before but the agitated woman was – quite unmistakably – Sylvie. If she hadn’t recognized Sylvie, she would have recognized the mink, given to her by Hugh for their tenth wedding anniversary. She seemed a long way from Gerrards Cross.

‘Well,’ Izzie said when the car was finally facing the right way, ‘that was a tricky manoeuvre!’

When it came to the next week Ursula was indeed absent from Izzie’s column, even in fictional form. She had written instead about the freedom that the single woman could obtain from ownership of ‘a little car’. ‘The joys of the open road far surpass being trapped on a filthy omnibus or being followed down a dark street by a stranger. One has no need to glance nervously over one’s shoulder at the wheel of a Sunbeam.’

‘I say, that’s grim,’ Pamela said. ‘Do you think she has? Been followed down a street by a stranger?’

‘Lots of times, I expect.’

Ursula was not called upon again to be Izzie’s ‘special chum’, indeed none of them heard from her again until she turned up on the doorstep on Christmas Eve (invited but not expected) and declared herself to be ‘in a bit of a jam’, a state which necessitated her being closeted in the growlery with Hugh, to emerge an hour later looking almost chastened. She had brought no presents with her and smoked throughout Christmas dinner, picking listlessly at her food. ‘Annual income twenty pounds,’ Hugh said when Bridget brought the brandy-soaked pudding to the table. ‘Annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ Izzie said and flounced off before Teddy could put a match to the pudding.

‘Dickens,’ Sylvie said to Ursula.

‘J’étais un peu dérangée,’ Izzie said to Ursula, rather contritely, next morning by way of explanation.

‘Silly of me, really,’ Izzie said. ‘I got in a bit of a muddle.’

In the new year the Sunbeam disappeared and the Basil Street address was exchanged for a less salubrious one in Swiss Cottage (an even duller endroit) but nonetheless Izzie remained undeniably Izzie.