Millie Shawcross was also invited to tea and had arrived early, her usual chirpy self. Her present was an assortment of lovely velvet hair ribbons, bought with her own money from the haberdasher’s in town. (‘Now you’ll never be able to cut your hair,’ Hugh said to Ursula, with some satisfaction.)
Maurice had brought two friends to stay for the weekend, Gilbert and an American, Howard (‘Call me Howie, everyone does’), who were going to have to double up in the spare-room bed, a fact that seemed to make Sylvie uneasy. ‘You can go top to tail,’ she told them briskly. ‘Or one of you can sleep on a cot with the Great Western Railway,’ which was their name for Teddy’s Hornby train set that took up all of Mrs Glover’s old room in the attic. Jimmy was allowed to share this pleasure. ‘Your sidekick, huh?’ Howie said to Teddy, ruffling Jimmy’s hair so vigorously that Jimmy was knocked off balance. The fact that Howie was an American gave him a special kind of glamour, although it was Gilbert who had the brooding, rather exotic, movie star looks. His name – Gilbert Armstrong – and his father (a high court judge) and his education (Stowe) pointed to impeccably English credentials but his mother was the scion of an old Spanish aristocratic family (‘Gypsies,’ Mrs Glover concluded, which was pretty much what she considered all foreigners to be).
‘Oh, my,’ Millie whispered to Ursula, ‘the gods walk among us.’ She crossed her hands over her heart and flapped them like wings. ‘Not Maurice,’ Ursula said. ‘He would have been kicked off Olympus for getting on everyone’s nerves.’
‘The self-importance of gods,’ Millie said, ‘what a wonderful title for a novel.’ Millie, needless to say, wanted to be a writer. Or an artist, or a singer, or a dancer, or an actress. Anything where she might be the centre of attention.
‘What are you little girls chattering about?’ Maurice said. Maurice was very sensitive, some might have said over-sensitive, to criticism.
‘You,’ Ursula said. Girls did find Maurice attractive, a fact that continually surprised the women in his own family. He had fair hair that looked as if it had been marcelled and a strapping physique from rowing but it was hard to overlook his charmlessness. Gilbert, however, was even now kissing Sylvie’s hand (‘Oh,’ said Millie, ‘can it get any better?’). Maurice had introduced Sylvie as ‘My old mater,’ and Gilbert said, ‘You’re too young to be anyone’s mother.’
‘I know,’ Sylvie said.
(‘A rather louche fellow’ was Hugh’s verdict. ‘A Lothario,’ Mrs Glover said.)
The three young men seemed to fill Fox Corner as if the house had suddenly shrunk and both Hugh and Sylvie were relieved when Maurice suggested that they go outside for ‘a tour of the grounds’. ‘Good idea,’ Sylvie said, ‘work off some of that surplus energy.’ The three of them ran out into the garden in Olympian fashion (sportive rather than sacred) and commenced a hearty kick-about with a ball that Maurice had found in the hall cupboard. (‘Mine, actually,’ Teddy pointed out to no one in particular.) ‘They’ll ruin the lawn,’ Hugh said, observing them howling like hooligans as they chewed up the grass with their muddy brogues.
‘Oh,’ Izzie said, when she arrived and caught sight of this athletic trio through the window, ‘I say, they’re rather gorgeous, aren’t they? Can I have one?’
Izzie, swathed from head to toe in fox fur, said, ‘I brought gifts,’ an unnecessary announcement as she was laden with all kinds of different-shaped parcels in expensive wrapping ‘for my favourite niece’. Ursula glanced at Pamela and gave a rueful shrug. Pamela rolled her eyes. Ursula hadn’t seen Izzie in months, not since a fleeting visit to Swiss Cottage in the car with Hugh to drop off a crate full of vegetables from Fox Corner’s bountiful late-summer garden. (‘A marrow?’ Izzie said, inspecting the contents of the box. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with that?’)
Prior to that she had visited for a long weekend but had more or less ignored everyone except Teddy, whom she took off for long walks and quizzed relentlessly. ‘I think she’s singled him out from the herd,’ Ursula told Pamela. ‘Why?’ Pamela said. ‘So she can eat him?’
When questioned (closely by Sylvie), Teddy was mystified as to why he had received special attention. ‘She just asked me what I did, what school was like, what my hobbies were, what I liked to eat. My friends. Stuff like that.’
‘Maybe she wants to adopt him,’ Hugh said to Sylvie. ‘Or sell him. I’m sure Ted would bring a good price.’ And Sylvie, fiercely, ‘Don’t say things like that, not even in jest.’ But then Teddy was dropped by Izzie as swiftly as he’d been picked up by her and they had thought no more of it.
The first of Ursula’s presents to be unwrapped was a recording by Bessie Smith which Izzie immediately placed on the gramophone, home usually to Elgar and, Hugh’s favourite, The Mikado. ‘The “St Louis Blues”,’ Izzie said instructively. ‘Listen to that cornet! Ursula loves this music.’ (‘Do you?’ Hugh asked Ursula. ‘I had no idea.’) Then a lovely tooled red-leather edition of Dante in translation was produced. This was followed by a satin and lace bedjacket from Liberty’s – ‘as you know, a shop of which your mother is inordinately fond’. This was pronounced ‘far too grown-up’ by Sylvie, ‘Ursula wears flannelette.’ Next a bottle of Shalimar (‘new by Guerlain, divine’) which received a similar verdict from Sylvie.
‘So speaks the child bride,’ Izzie said.
‘’I was eighteen, not sixteen,’ a tight-lipped Sylvie said. ‘One day we must talk about what you got up to at sixteen, Isobel.’
‘What?’ Pamela said eagerly.
‘Il n’avait pas d’importance,’ Izzie said dismissively. Finally, from this cornucopia, a bottle of champagne. (‘And definitely far too young for that!’)
‘Better get that on ice,’ Izzie said, handing it to Bridget.
A perplexed Hugh glared at Izzie. ‘Did you steal all this?’ he asked.
‘Hey, darkie music,’ Howie said when the three boys returned from the outdoors, crowding into the drawing room and smelling vaguely of bonfires and something else, less definable (‘Essence of stag,’ Izzie murmured, sniffing the air). Bessie Smith was now on her third go round and Hugh said, ‘It begins to grow on one after a while.’ Howie did some kind of odd dance to the music, vaguely barbaric, and then whispered something in Gilbert’s ear. Gilbert laughed, rather crudely for someone with blue blood, albeit foreign, and Sylvie clapped her hands and said, ‘Boys, how about some potted shrimps?’ and marshalled them into the dining room when she noticed, too late, the dirty footprints they had tracked through the house.
‘They didn’t fight in the war,’ Hugh said, as if that explained their muddy spoor.
‘And that’s a good thing,’ Sylvie said firmly. ‘No matter how unsatisfactory they turn out.’
‘Now,’ Izzie said when the cake was cut and apportioned, ‘I have one last gift—’
‘For goodness’, sake, Izzie,’ Hugh interrupted, unable to contain his exasperation any longer. ‘Who is paying for this? You have no money, your debts are piled to the rafters. You promised you would learn economy.’