Like a Fox in a Hole
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.