‘Ah,’ Sylvie said, as if suddenly understanding something that had puzzled her.
‘And they call it horsepower,’ Mrs Glover snorted, bull-like herself. ‘That’s what comes of relying on new-fangled machines.’
‘Mm,’ Sylvie said, reluctant to argue with such strongly held views. She was surprised that Dr Fellowes had left without examining either herself or the baby.
‘He looked in on you. You were asleep,’ Mrs Glover said. Sylvie sometimes wondered if Mrs Glover was a mind-reader. A perfectly horrible thought.
‘He ate his breakfast first,’ Mrs Glover said, displaying both approval and disapproval in the same breath. ‘The man has an appetite, that’s for sure.’
‘I could eat a horse,’ Sylvie laughed. She couldn’t, of course. Tiffin popped briefly into her mind. She picked up the silver cutlery, heavy like weapons, ready to tackle Mrs Glover’s devilled kidneys. ‘Lovely,’ she said (were they?) but Mrs Glover was already busy inspecting the baby in the cradle. (‘Plump as a suckling pig.’) Sylvie idly wondered if Mrs Haddock was still stuck somewhere outside Chalfont St Peter.
‘I hear the baby nearly died,’ Mrs Glover said.
‘Well …’ Sylvie said. Such a fine line between living and dying. Her own father, the society portraitist, slipped on an Isfahan rug on a first-floor landing after some fine cognac one evening. The next morning he was discovered dead at the foot of the stairs. No one had heard him fall or cry out. He had just begun a portrait of the Earl of Balfour. Never finished. Obviously.
Afterwards it turned out that he had been more profligate with his money than mother and daughter realized. A secret gambler, markers all over town. He had made no provision at all for unexpected death and soon there were creditors crawling over the nice house in Mayfair. A house of cards as it turned out. Tiffin had to go. Broke Sylvie’s heart, the grief greater than any she felt for her father.
‘I thought his only vice was women,’ her mother said, roosting temporarily on a packing case as if modelling for a pietà.
They sank into genteel and well-mannered poverty. Sylvie’s mother grew pale and uninteresting, larks soared no more for her as she faded, consumed by consumption. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie was rescued from becoming an artist’s model by a man she met at the post-office counter. Hugh. A rising star in the prosperous world of banking. The epitome of bourgeois respectability. What more could a beautiful but penniless girl hope for?
Lottie died with less fuss than was expected and Hugh and Sylvie married quietly on Sylvie’s eighteenth birthday. (‘There,’ Hugh said, ‘now you will never forget the anniversary of our marriage.’) They spent their honeymoon in France, a delightful quinzaine in Deauville, before settling in semi-rural bliss near Beaconsfield in a house that was vaguely Lutyens in style. It had everything one could ask for – a large kitchen, a drawing room with French windows on to the lawn, a pretty morning room and several bedrooms waiting to be filled with children. There was even a little room at the back of the house for Hugh to use as a study. ‘Ah, my growlery,’ he laughed.
It was surrounded at a discreet distance by similar houses. There was a meadow and a copse and a bluebell wood beyond with a stream running through it. The train station, no more than a halt, would allow Hugh to be at his banker’s desk in less than an hour.
‘Sleepy hollow,’ Hugh laughed as he gallantly carried Sylvie across the threshold. It was a relatively modest dwelling (nothing like Mayfair) but nonetheless a little beyond their means, a fiscal recklessness that surprised them both.
‘We should give the house a name,’ Hugh said. ‘The Laurels, the Pines, the Elms.’
‘But we have none of those in the garden,’ Sylvie pointed out. They were standing at the French windows of the newly purchased house, looking at a swathe of overgrown lawn. ‘We must get a gardener,’ Hugh said. The house itself was echoingly empty. They had not yet begun to fill it with the Voysey rugs and Morris fabrics and all the other aesthetic comforts of a twentieth-century house. Sylvie would have quite happily lived in Liberty’s rather than the as-yet-to-be-named marital home.
‘Greenacres, Fairview, Sunnymead?’ Hugh offered, putting his arm around his bride.
‘No.’
The previous owner of their unnamed house had sold up and gone to live in Italy. ‘Imagine,’ Sylvie said dreamily. She had been to Italy when she was younger, a grand tour with her father while her mother went to Eastbourne for her lungs.
‘Full of Italians,’ Hugh said dismissively.
‘Quite. That’s rather the attraction,’ Sylvie said, unwinding herself from his arm.
‘The Gables, the Homestead?’
‘Do stop,’ Sylvie said.
A fox appeared out of the shrubbery and crossed the lawn. ‘Oh, look,’ Sylvie said. ‘How tame it seems, it must have grown used to the house being unoccupied.’
‘Let’s hope the local hunt isn’t following on its heels,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s a scrawny beast.’
‘It’s a vixen. She’s a nursing mother, you can see her teats.’
Hugh blinked at such blunt terminology falling from the lips of his recently virginal bride. (One presumed. One hoped.)
‘Look,’ Sylvie whispered. Two small cubs sprang out on to the grass and tumbled over each other in play. ‘Oh, they’re such handsome little creatures!’
‘Some might say vermin.’
‘Perhaps they see us as verminous,’ Sylvie said. ‘Fox Corner – that’s what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?’
‘Really?’ Hugh said doubtfully. ‘It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it? It sounds like a children’s story. The House at Fox Corner.’
‘A little whimsy never hurt anyone.’
‘Strictly speaking though,’ Hugh said, ‘can a house be a corner? Isn’t it at one?’
So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.
Two small children peered cautiously round the door. ‘Here you are,’ Sylvie said, smiling. ‘Maurice, Pamela, come and say hello to your new sister.’
Warily, they approached the cradle and its contents as if unsure as to what it might contain. Sylvie remembered a similar feeling when viewing her father’s body in its elaborate oak and brass coffin (charitably paid for by fellow members of the Royal Academy). Or perhaps it was Mrs Glover they were chary of.
‘Another girl,’ Maurice said gloomily. He was five, two years older than Pamela and the man of the family for as long as Hugh was away. ‘On business,’ Sylvie informed people although in fact he had crossed the Channel post-haste to rescue his foolish youngest sister from the clutches of the married man with whom she had eloped to Paris.
Maurice poked a finger in the baby’s face and she woke up and squawked in alarm. Mrs Glover pinched Maurice’s ear. Sylvie winced but Maurice accepted the pain stoically. Sylvie thought that she really must have a word with Mrs Glover when she was feeling stronger.
‘What are you going to call her?’ Mrs Glover asked.
‘Ursula,’ Sylvie said. ‘I shall call her Ursula. It means little she-bear.’
Mrs Glover nodded non-committally. The middle classes were a law unto themselves. Her own strapping son was a straightforward George. ‘Tiller of the soil, from the Greek,’ according to the vicar who christened him and George was indeed a ploughman on the nearby Ettringham Hall estate farm, as if the very naming of him had formed his destiny. Not that Mrs Glover was much given to thinking about destiny. Or Greeks, for that matter.
‘Well, must be getting on,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’ll be a nice steak pie for lunch. And an Egyptian pudding to follow.’
Sylvie had no idea what an Egyptian pudding was. She imagined pyramids.