‘You’d have me slave over a hot stove rather than a Bunsen burner?’
‘What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?’ Sylvie said.
‘Well, it’s a crying shame about Cambridge,’ Hugh said. ‘Maurice is set to get a first and he’s a complete dolt.’ To make up for Pamela’s disappointment he bought her a Raleigh loop-frame roadster and Teddy asked what he would get if he failed an exam. Hugh laughed and said, ‘Careful, that’s Augustus talk.’
‘Oh, please, don’t,’ Teddy said, mortified at any mention of the book. The Adventures of Augustus had, to everyone’s chagrin but particularly Teddy’s, proved a roaring success, ‘flying off the bookshelves’ and reprinted three times so far, according to Izzie who had already earned a ‘fat little royalty cheque’ and moved into a flat in Ovington Square. She had also done an interview for a newspaper in which she mentioned her ‘prototype’, her ‘charming rogue of a nephew’.
‘But not my name,’ Teddy said, hanging on to hope. He got a conciliation gift from Izzie in the shape of a new dog. Trixie had died a few weeks previously and Teddy had been in mourning ever since. The new dog was a Westie, like Augustus’s dog – not a breed that any of them would have chosen. He had already been christened by Izzie – Jock, naturally, the name engraved on the tag on his expensive collar.
Sylvie suggested changing his name to Pilot (‘Charlotte Brontë’s dog,’ she said to Ursula. (‘One day,’ Ursula said to Pamela, ‘my communion with our mother will consist entirely of the names of the great writers of the past,’ and Pamela said, ‘I think it probably already does.’)
The little dog already answered to Jock and it seemed wrong to confuse him, so Jock he remained, and in time they all grew to love him best of any of their dogs despite his annoying provenance.
Maurice turned up on a Saturday morning, this time with only Howie in tow and no sign of Gilbert, who had been sent down for ‘an indiscretion’. When Pamela said, ‘What indiscretion?’ Sylvie said that it was the definition of an indiscretion that you didn’t speak of it afterwards.
Ursula had thought of Howie quite often since their last encounter. It was not so much the physical Howie – the Oxford bags, the soft-collared shirt, the brilliantined hair – but the fact that he had been thoughtful enough to try to find Teddy’s lost ball. Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold – large, male and American. Despite her ambivalent feelings she couldn’t help but experience a slight thrill when she saw him hop effortlessly out of his open-top car, parked outside the front door of Fox Corner.
‘Hey,’ he said when he caught sight of her and she realized her imaginary beau didn’t even know her name.
A pot of coffee and a plate of scones were hastily conjured up by Sylvie and Bridget. ‘We’re not staying,’ Maurice said to Sylvie, who said, ‘Thank goodness, I don’t have enough to stretch to feed two hulking young men.’
‘We’re going up to London to help out with the strike,’ Maurice said. Hugh expressed surprise. He hadn’t realized, he said, that Maurice’s politics put him on the side of the workers and Maurice in turn expressed surprise that his father could even think this was the case. They were going to drive buses and trains, and whatever else it took ‘to keep the country running’.
‘I didn’t know you knew how to drive a train, Maurice,’ Teddy said, suddenly finding his brother interesting.
‘Well, a stoker, then,’ Maurice said irritably, ‘it can’t be that difficult.’
‘They’re not called stokers, they’re called firemen,’ Pamela said, ‘and it’s a very skilled job. Ask your friend Smithy.’ A remark which for some reason got Maurice even hotter under the collar.
‘You’re trying to shore up a civilization that’s in its death throes,’ Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. ‘There’s really no point.’
Ursula left the room at this juncture, if there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.
And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent – a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what – she was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. ‘I was looking for a bathroom,’ he said.
‘Well, we only have one,’ Ursula said, ‘and it’s not up these—’ but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the back stairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. ‘Pretty girl,’ he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate.
She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said, ‘Ssh,’ as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie’s jaws.
She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs – wrinkled cockles, a little spout – and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring.
And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. ‘English girls,’ he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, ‘You really are something!’ He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst.
Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as ‘deflowering’, she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word.
When she came back downstairs a half-hour later, a half-hour of thoughts and emotions considerably more intense than was usual for a Saturday morning, Sylvie and Hugh were on the doorstep waving a dutiful goodbye to the disappearing rear end of Howie’s car.
‘Thank goodness they weren’t staying,’ Sylvie said. ‘I don’t think I could have been bothered with Maurice’s bluster.’
‘Imbeciles,’ Hugh said cheerfully. ‘All right?’ he said, catching sight of Ursula in the hallway.
‘Yes,’ she said. Any other answer would have been too awful.
Ursula found it easier than she had expected to lock this occurrence away. After all, hadn’t Sylvie herself said that the definition of an indiscretion was that you didn’t speak of it afterwards? Ursula imagined a cupboard in her mind, a corner one, in simple pitch pine. Howie and the back stairs were put on a high shelf and the key was firmly turned in the lock.