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.)