‘You can imagine how many questions there would be if they saw that,’ she said, slipping the ring off and leaving it on the hall table.
Crighton kissed her lightly on the cheek and said, ‘Have a nice time.’
‘No guarantee of that,’ she said.
‘Still not caught yourself a man?’ Izzie asked Ursula. ‘Of course,’ she said, turning brightly to Sylvie, ‘you have – how many grandchildren now, seven, eight?’
‘Six. Perhaps you’re a grandmother, Izzie.’
‘What?’ Maurice said. ‘How could she be?’
‘Anyway,’ Izzie said airily, ‘it takes the pressure off Ursula to produce one.’
‘Produce?’ Ursula said, a forkful of salmon in aspic suspended on its way to her mouth.
‘Looks like you’re left on the shelf,’ Maurice said.
‘Pardon?’ The fork returned to the plate.
‘Always the bridesmaid …’
‘Once,’ Ursula said. ‘I have been a bridesmaid once only, to Pamela.’
‘I’ll have that if you’re not eating it,’ Jimmy said, filching the salmon.
‘I was, actually.’
‘Even worse then,’ Maurice said. ‘Nobody even wants you as a bridesmaid except for your sister.’ He sniggered, more schoolboy than man. He was, annoyingly, seated too far away for her to kick him beneath the table.
‘Manners, Maurice,’ Edwina murmured. How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered? It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all. Of course, Edwina’s nose was currently out of joint on account of the driver, who turned out to be a rather attractive ATS girl in uniform. Sylvie, to the girl’s embarrassment (her name was Penny but everyone immediately forgot this), insisted that she join them at the table when she would clearly have been more comfortable staying with the car, or in the kitchen with Bridget. She was stuck at the cramped end of the table with the evacuees and was the object of constant frosty scrutiny from Edwina. Maurice, on the other hand, studiously ignored her. Ursula tried to read some meaning into this. She wished Pamela were here, she was very good at deciphering people, although not perhaps as good as Izzie. (‘So, Maurice has been a naughty boy, I see. Mind you, she’s a looker. Women in uniform, what man can resist?’)
Philip and Hazel sat passively between their parents. Sylvie had never been particularly fond of Maurice’s children whereas she seemed to delight in her evacuees, Barry and Bobby (‘my two busy bees’), currently crawling beneath the Regency Revival dining table, giggling in a rather manic fashion. ‘Full of mischief,’ Sylvie said indulgently. The evacuees, as everyone else referred to them, as if they were entirely defined by their status, had been scrubbed and polished into apparent innocence by Bridget and Sylvie but nothing could disguise their impish nature. (‘What little horrors,’ Izzie said with a shudder.) Ursula rather liked them, they reminded her of the small Millers. If they had been dogs their tails would have been constantly wagging.
Sylvie now had a pair of real puppies as well, excitable black Labradors who were also brothers. They were called Hector and Hamish but seemed to be known collectively and indistinguishably as ‘the dogs’. The dogs and the evacuees appeared to have contributed to a new shabbiness in Fox Corner. Sylvie herself seemed more reconciled now to this war than she had ever been to the last one. Hugh less so. He had been ‘pushed’ into training the Home Guard and had only this morning after Sunday service been instructing the ‘ladies’ of the local church in the use of the stirrup pump.
‘Is that suitable for the Sabbath?’ Edwina asked. ‘I’m sure God’s on our side, but …’ she tailed off, incapable of sustaining a theological position despite being ‘a devout Christian’, which meant, according to Pamela, that she slapped her children hard and made them eat for breakfast what they left at tea.
‘Of course it’s suitable,’ Maurice said. ‘In my role organizing the civil defence—’
‘I don’t consider myself to be “on the shelf” as you so charmingly put it,’ Ursula interrupted him irritably. Again, she experienced a fleeting wish for Crighton’s be-medalled, braided presence. How horrified Edwina would be to know of Egerton Gardens. (‘And how is the Admiral?’ Izzie asked later in the garden, sotto voce, like a conspirator, for, of course, she knew. Izzie knew everything and if she didn’t know it she could mouse it out with ease. Like Ursula, she had the character for espionage. ‘He’s not an admiral,’ Ursula said. ‘But he is well, thank you.’)
‘You do all right on your own,’ Teddy said to Ursula. ‘Contracted to thine own bright eyes, and so on.’ Teddy had faith in poetry, as if merely to quote from Shakespeare would mollify a situation. Ursula thought the sonnet he was quoting from was about being selfish but didn’t say so as Teddy meant it kindly. Unlike everyone else, it seemed, all of whom appeared quite fixed on her unmarried status.
‘She’s only thirty, for heaven’s sake,’ Izzie said, putting in her oar again. (If only they would all be quiet, Ursula thought.) ‘After all,’ Izzie persisted, ‘I was over forty when I married.’
‘And where is your husband?’ Sylvie asked, looking around the Regency Revival – both leaves extended to accommodate their numbers. She feigned perplexity (it didn’t suit her). ‘I don’t seem to see him here.’
Izzie had chosen the occasion to turn up (‘Uninvited, as usual,’ Sylvie said) to offer her congratulations on Hugh’s six decades. (‘A landmark.’) Hugh’s other sisters had deemed the journey to Fox Corner ‘too challenging’.
‘What a parcel of vixens they are,’ Izzie said later to Ursula. Izzie might have been the baby but she was never the favourite. ‘Hugh has always been so good to them.’
‘He’s always been good to everyone,’ Ursula said, surprised, alarmed even, to find tears starting up at the thought of her father’s sound character.
‘Oh, don’t,’ Izzie said, handing her a froth of lace that apparently passed as a handkerchief. ‘You’ll make me cry as well.’ It seemed unlikely, it had never happened before.
Izzie had also chosen the occasion to announce her imminent departure for California. Her husband, the famous playwright, had been offered a job writing screenplays in Hollywood. ‘All the Europeans are going there,’ she said.
‘You’re European now, are you?’ Hugh said.
‘Aren’t we all?’
The whole family had gathered, apart from Pamela, for whom the journey was genuinely too challenging. Jimmy had managed to wangle a couple of days’ leave and Teddy had brought Nancy along. On arrival, she gave Hugh a disarming hug, said, ‘Happy birthday, Mr Todd,’ before handing him a parcel, wrapped prettily in old wallpaper scavenged from the Shawcross household. It was a copy of The Warden. ‘It’s a first edition,’ Nancy said. ‘Ted said that you liked Trollope.’ (A fact that none of the rest of his family appeared to know.)
‘Good old Ted,’ Hugh said, kissing her on the cheek. And to Teddy, ‘What a sweetheart you have here. When are you going to pop the question?’
‘Oh,’ Nancy said, blushing and laughing, ‘plenty of time for that.’
‘I hope so,’ a sombre Sylvie said. Teddy had graduated now from the Initial Training School (‘He has wings!’ Nancy said. ‘Like an angel!’) and was waiting to sail to Canada, to train as a pilot. When he was qualified he would head back here and take up a place in an Operational Training Unit.
He was more likely to be killed in an OTU, he said, ‘than on an actual bombing run’. It was true. Ursula knew a girl in the Air Ministry. (She knew girls everywhere, everyone did.) They ate their sandwiches together in St James’s Park and gloomily traded statistics, despite the dead hand of the Official Secrets Act.