‘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.