‘Please,’ Sylvie said. Any discussion of money (even Izzie’s) in front of strangers filled her with reticent horror. A sudden dark cloud passed over her heart. It was Tiffin, she knew.
‘I am paying,’ Izzie said, very grandly. ‘And this is not a present for Ursula, it is for Teddy.’
‘Me?’ Teddy said, startled on to centre stage. He had been thinking what a jolly good cake it was and wondering what the chances of a second piece were and certainly had no desire to be pushed into the limelight.
‘Yes, you, darling boy,’ Izzie said. Teddy visibly shrank away from both Izzie and the present that she put on the table in front of him. ‘Go on,’ Izzie said encouragingly, ‘unwrap it. It won’t explode.’ (But it would.)
Gingerly, Teddy removed the expensive paper. Unwrapped, the present turned out to be exactly what it looked like when wrapped – a book. Ursula, sitting opposite, tried to decipher the upside-down title. The Adventures of …
‘The Adventures of Augustus,’ Teddy read out loud, ‘by Delphie Fox.’ (‘Delphie?’ Hugh queried.)
‘Why is everything an “adventure” with you?’ Sylvie said irritably to Izzie.
‘Because life is an adventure, of course.’
‘I would say it was more of an endurance race,’ Sylvie said. ‘Or an obstacle course.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ Hugh said, suddenly solicitous, ‘not that bad, surely?’
‘Anyway,’ Izzie said, ‘back to Teddy’s present.’
The thick card of the cover was green, the lettering and line drawings were gold – illustrations of a boy, roughly Teddy’s age, wearing a schoolboy’s cap. He was accompanied by a catapult and a small dog, a scruffy West Highland terrier. The boy was dishevelled and had a wild look on his face. ‘That’s Augustus,’ Izzie said to Teddy. ‘What do you think? I’ve based him on you.’
‘Me?’ Teddy said, horrified. ‘But I don’t look like that. It’s not even the right dog.’
Something astonishing. ‘Give anyone a lift back to town?’ Izzie asked casually.
‘You haven’t got another car?’ Hugh moaned.
‘I parked it at the foot of the drive,’ Izzie said sweetly, ‘so as not to annoy you.’ They all trooped down the drive to inspect the car, Pamela, still on her crutches, hobbling tardily behind. ‘The poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind,’ she said to Millie and Millie laughed and said, ‘For a scientist you know your Bible.’
‘Best to know your enemy,’ Pamela said.
It was cold and none of them had thought to put their coats on. ‘But really quite mild for this time of year,’ Sylvie said. ‘Not like when you were born. Goodness, I’ve never seen snow like that.’
‘I know,’ Ursula said. The snow the day she was born was a legend in the family. She had heard the story so often that she thought she could remember it.
‘It’s just an Austin,’ Izzie said. ‘An open-road tourer – four doors though – but nowhere near as costly as a Bentley, goodness, it’s positively a vehicle for hoi polloi compared to your indulgence, Hugh.’ ‘On tick, no doubt,’ Hugh said. ‘Not at all, paid up in full, in cash. I have a publisher, I have money, Hugh. You don’t need to worry about me any more.’
While everyone was admiring (or not, in the case of Hugh and Sylvie) the cherry-bright vehicle, Millie said, ‘I have to go, I have a dancing exhibition tonight. Thank you very much for a lovely tea, Mrs Todd.’
‘Come on, I’ll walk you back,’ Ursula said.
On the return home, through the well-worn shortcut at the bottom of the gardens, Ursula had an unexpected encounter – this was the something amazing, not the Austin tourer – when she almost tripped over Howie, on his hands and knees, rooting among the bushes. ‘Looking for the ball,’ he said apologetically. ‘It was your kid brother’s. I think we lost it in the’ – he sat back on his heels and looked around helplessly at the berberis and buddleia – ‘Shrubbery,’ Ursula supplied. ‘We aspire to it.’
‘Huh?’ he said, standing up in one clean move and suddenly towering above her. He looked as though he boxed. Indeed there was a bruise below his eye. Fred Smith, who used to be the butcher’s boy but now worked on the railways, was a boxer. Maurice had taken a couple of his pals to cheer Fred on in an amateur bout in the East End. Apparently it had dissolved into a boozy riot. Howie smelt of bay rum – Hugh’s scent – and there was something polished and new about him, like a freshly minted coin.
‘Did you find it?’ she asked. ‘The ball?’ She sounded squeaky to her own ears. She had thought Gilbert was the handsome one out of the two but faced with Howie’s clean-limbed, uncomplicated strength, like a large animal, she felt stupid.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Sixteen,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday. You ate cake.’ Clearly she wasn’t the only stupid one.
‘Hoo-ee,’ he said, an ambiguous kind of word (closely related to his own name, she noted) although it seemed to signal amazement as if reaching sixteen was a feat. ‘You’re shivering,’ he said.
‘It’s freezing out here.’
‘I can warm you up,’ he said and then – the something astonishing – he took her by the shoulders and pulled her towards him and – an action that necessitated bending down quite a bit – pushed his big lips against hers. ‘Kiss’ seemed too courtly a word for what Howie was doing. He prodded his enormous tongue, like an ox’s, against the portcullis of her teeth and she was amazed to realize that he was expecting her to open her mouth and let the tongue in. She would choke, for sure. Mrs Glover’s tongue press in the kitchen came unwontedly to mind.
Ursula was debating what to do, the bay rum and the lack of oxygen were making her dizzy, when they heard Maurice shouting, quite nearby, ‘Howie! Leaving without you, chum!’ Ursula’s mouth was released and, without a word to her, Howie yelled, ‘Coming!’ so loudly that her ears hurt. Then he let go of her and set off, crashing through the bushes, leaving Ursula gasping for air.
She wandered back to the house in a daze. Everyone was still on the drive, even though it felt like hours had passed but she supposed it was only minutes really, like in the best fairy stories. In the dining room, the ruins of the cake were being licked delicately by Hattie. The Adventures of Augustus, lying on the table, had a smear of icing on it. Ursula’s heart was still palpitating from the shock of Howie’s advances. To be kissed on her sixteenth birthday, and in such an unlooked-for way, seemed a considerable accomplishment. She was surely passing beneath the triumphal arch that led to womanhood. If only it had been Benjamin Cole, then it would have been perfect!
Teddy, ‘the kid’, himself appeared, very browned off and said, ‘They lost my ball.’
‘I know,’ Ursula said.
He opened the book at the title page where, in a flamboyant hand, Izzie had inscribed, To my nephew, Teddy. My own darling Augustus.
‘What rot,’ Teddy said, scowling. Ursula picked up a half-drunk glass of champagne the rim of which was adorned with red lipstick and poured half of it into a jelly glass that she handed to Teddy. ‘Cheers,’ she said. They chinked their glasses and drained them to the dregs.
‘Happy birthday,’ Teddy said.
May 1926
BY THE BEGINNING of the month, Pamela, off her crutches and back to playing tennis, had learned that she had failed her Cambridge exam. ‘I panicked,’ she said, ‘I saw questions I didn’t know and I went to pieces and flunked it. I should have swotted more or if I’d just stayed calm and thought it through I could probably have made a good fist of it.’
‘There are other universities if you’re so set on being a bluestocking,’ Sylvie said. Sylvie, although she never quite came out and said it, thought academia was pointless for girls. ‘After all, woman’s highest calling is to be a mother and a wife.’