‘Oh, no, it was most definitely something,’ Sylvie said.
‘Glad to be back?’ Hugh beamed, greeting them on the station platform.
‘Are you glad to have us back?’ Sylvie said, somewhat combatively.
‘There’s a surprise for you at home,’ Hugh said. Sylvie didn’t like surprises, they all knew that.
‘Guess,’ Hugh said.
They guessed a new puppy which was a far cry from the Petter engine that Hugh had had installed in the cellar. They all trooped down the steep stone staircase and stared at its oily throbbing presence, its rows of glass accumulators. ‘Let there be light,’ Hugh said.
It would be a long time before any of them were able to snap a light switch without expecting to be blown up. Light was all it could manage, of course. Bridget had hoped for a vacuum cleaner to replace her Ewbank but there wasn’t enough voltage. ‘Thank goodness,’ Sylvie said.
July 1914
FROM THE OPEN French windows Sylvie watched Maurice erecting a makeshift tennis net, which mostly seemed to involve whacking everything in sight with a mallet. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
Noisy chatter in the hallway announced the jaunty arrival of Margaret and Lily, once schoolfriends and now infrequent acquaintances, bearing gaily beribboned gifts for the new baby, Edward.
Margaret was an artist, militantly unmarried, conceivably someone’s mistress, a scandalous possibility that Sylvie hadn’t mentioned to Hugh. Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs. Sylvie thought of women being restrained while tubes were pushed down their throats and raised a reassuring hand to her own lovely white neck. Lily’s husband, Cavendish (the name of a hotel, not a man, surely), had once cornered Sylvie at a teadance, pressing her up against a pillar with his goatish, cigar-scented body, suggesting something so outrageous that even now she felt hot with embarrassment at the thought of it.
‘Ah, the fresh air,’ Lily exclaimed when Sylvie led them out into the garden. ‘It’s so rural here.’ They cooed like doves – or pigeons, that lesser species – over the pram, admiring the baby almost as much as they applauded Sylvie’s svelte figure.
‘I’ll ring for tea,’ Sylvie said, already tired.
They had a dog. A big, brindled French mastiff called Bosun. ‘The name of Byron’s dog,’ Sylvie said. Ursula had no idea who the mysterious Byron was but he showed no interest in reclaiming his dog from them. Bosun had soft loose furry skin that rolled beneath Ursula’s fingers and his breath smelt of the scrag-end that Mrs Glover, to her disgust, had to stew for him. He was a good dog, Hugh said, a responsible dog, the kind that pulled people from burning buildings and rescued them from drowning.
Pamela liked to dress Bosun up in an old bonnet and shawl and pretend that he was her baby, although they had a real baby now – a boy, Edward. Everyone called him Teddy. Their mother seemed taken by surprise by the new baby. ‘I don’t know where he came from.’ Sylvie had a laugh like a hiccup. She was taking tea on the lawn with two schoolfriends ‘from her London days’ who had come to inspect the new arrival. All three of them wore lovely flimsy dresses and big straw hats and sat in the wicker chairs, drinking tea and eating Mrs Glover’s sherry cake. Ursula and Bosun sat on the grass a polite distance away, hoping for crumbs.
Maurice had put up a net and was trying, not very enthusiastically, to teach Pamela how to play tennis. Ursula was occupied in making a daisy-chain coronet for Bosun. She had stubby, clumsy fingers. Sylvie had the long, deft fingers of an artist or a pianist. She played on the piano in the drawing room (‘Chopin’). Sometimes they sang rounds after tea but Ursula never managed to sing her part at the right time. (‘What a dolt,’ Maurice said. ‘Practice makes perfect,’ Sylvie said.) When she opened the lid of the piano there was a smell that was like the insides of old suitcases. It reminded Ursula of her grandmother, Adelaide, who spent her days swathed in black, sipping Madeira.
The new arrival was tucked away in the huge baby carriage under the big beech tree. They had all been occupants of this magnificence but none of them could remember it. A little silver hare dangled from the hood and the baby was cosy beneath a coverlet ‘embroidered by nuns’, although no one ever explained who these nuns were and why they had spent their days embroidering small yellow ducks.
‘Edward,’ one of Sylvie’s friends said. ‘Teddy?’
‘Ursula and Teddy. My two little bears,’ Sylvie said and laughed her hiccup laugh. Ursula wasn’t at all sure about being a bear. She would rather be a dog. She lay down on her back and stared up at the sky. Bosun groaned mightily and stretched out beside her. Swallows were knifing recklessly through the blue. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower being pushed by Old Tom in the Coles’ garden next door, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of the pinks in the border and the heady green of new-mown grass.
‘Ah,’ said one of Sylvie’s London friends, stretching out her legs and revealing graceful white-stockinged ankles. ‘A long, hot summer. Isn’t it delicious?’
The peace was broken by a disgusted Maurice throwing his racquet on to the grass where it bounced with a thump and a squeak. ‘I can’t teach her – she’s a girl!’ he yelled and stalked off into the shrubbery where he began to bash things with a stick, although in his head he was in the jungle with a machete. He was going to boarding school after the summer. It was the same school that Hugh had been to, and his father before him. (‘And so on, back to the Conquest probably,’ Sylvie said.) Hugh said it would be ‘the making’ of Maurice but he seemed quite made already to Ursula. Hugh said when he first went to the school he cried himself to sleep every night and yet he seemed more than happy to subject Maurice to the same torture. Maurice puffed out his chest and declared that he wouldn’t cry.
(‘And what about us?’ a worried Pamela asked. ‘Shall we have to go away to school?’
‘Not unless you’re very naughty,’ Hugh said, laughing.)
A pink-cheeked Pamela balled up her fists and, planting them on her hips, roared, ‘You’re such a pig!’ after Maurice’s indifferent, retreating back. She made ‘pig’ sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.
‘Pammy,’ Sylvie said mildly. ‘You sound like a fishwife.’
Ursula edged nearer to the source of cake.
‘Oh, come here,’ one of the women said to her, ‘let me look at you.’ Ursula tried to shy away but was held firmly in place by Sylvie. ‘She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?’ Sylvie’s friend said. ‘She takes after you, Sylvie.’
‘Fish have wives?’ Ursula said to her mother and Sylvie’s friends laughed, lovely bubbling laughs. ‘What a funny little thing,’ one of them said.
‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.
‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.
‘Children,’ Margaret said, ‘they are droll, aren’t they?’
They are so much more than that, Sylvie thought, but how do you explain the magnitude of motherhood to someone who has no children? Sylvie felt positively matronly in her present company, the friends of her brief girlhood curtailed by the relief of marriage.
Bridget came out with the tray and started to take away the tea things. In the mornings Bridget wore a striped print dress for housework but in the afternoons she changed into a black dress with white cuffs and collar and a matching white apron and little cap. She had been elevated out of the scullery. Alice had left to get married and Sylvie had engaged a girl from the village, Marjorie, a boss-eyed thirteen-year-old, to help with the rough work. (‘We couldn’t get by with just two of them?’ Hugh queried mildly. ‘Bridget and Mrs G? It’s not as if they’re running a mansion.’