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.
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.