‘No, we can’t,’ Sylvie said and that was the end of that.)
The little white cap was too big for Bridget and was forever slipping over her eyes, like a blindfold. On her way back across the lawn she was suddenly blinkered by the cap and tripped, a music-hall tumble that she rescued just in time and the only casualties were the silver sugar bowl and tongs that went shooting through the air, lumps of sugar scattering like blind dice across the green of the lawn. Maurice laughed extravagantly at Bridget’s misfortune, and Sylvie said, ‘Maurice, stop playing the fool.’
She watched as Bosun and Ursula picked up the jettisoned sugar lumps, Bosun with his big pink tongue, Ursula, eccentrically, with the tricky tongs. Bosun swallowed his quickly without chewing. Ursula sucked hers slowly, one by one. Sylvie suspected that Ursula was destined to be the odd one out. An only child herself, she was frequently disturbed by the complexity of sibling relationships among her own children.
‘You should come up to London,’ Margaret said suddenly. ‘Stay with me for a few days. We could have such fun.’
‘But the children,’ Sylvie said. ‘The baby. I can hardly leave them.’
‘Why not?’ Lily said. ‘Your nanny can manage for a few days, surely?’
‘But I have no nanny,’ Sylvie said. Lily cast her eyes around the garden as if she was looking for a nanny lurking in the hydrangeas. ‘Nor do I want one,’ Sylvie added. (Or did she?) Motherhood was her responsibility, her destiny. It was, lacking anything else (and what else could there be?), her life. The future of England was clutched to Sylvie’s bosom. Replacing her was not a casual undertaking, as if her absence meant little more than her presence. ‘And I am feeding the baby myself,’ she added. Both women seemed astonished. Lily unconsciously clasped a hand to her own bosom as if to protect it from assault.
‘It’s what God intended,’ Sylvie said, even though she hadn’t believed in God since the loss of Tiffin. Hugh rescued her, striding across the lawn like a man with a purpose. He laughed and said, ‘What’s going on here then?’ picking up Ursula and tossing her casually in the air, only stopping when she started to choke on a sugar lump. He smiled at Sylvie and said, ‘Your friends,’ as if she might have forgotten who they were.
‘Friday evening,’ Hugh said, depositing Ursula back on the grass, ‘the working man’s labours are over and I believe the sun is officially over the yardarm. Would you lovely ladies like to move on to something stronger than tea? Gin slings perhaps?’ Hugh had four younger sisters and felt comfortable with women. That in itself was enough to charm them. Sylvie knew his instincts were to chaperone, not to court, but she did occasionally wonder about his popularity and where it might lead. Or, indeed, have already led.
A détente was brokered between Maurice and Pamela. Sylvie asked Bridget to drag a table out on to the small but useful terrace so that the children could eat their tea outside – herring roe on toast and a pink shape that was barely set and quivered without restraint. The sight of it made Sylvie feel slightly queasy. ‘Nursery food,’ Hugh said with relish, observing his children eating.
‘Austria has declared war on Serbia,’ Hugh said conversationally and Margaret said, ‘How silly. I spent a wonderful weekend in Vienna last year. At the Imperial, do you know it?’
‘Not intimately,’ Hugh said.
Sylvie knew it but did not say so.
The evening turned into gossamer. Sylvie, drifting gently on a mist of alcohol, suddenly remembered her father’s cognac-induced demise and clapped her hands as if killing a small annoying fly and said, ‘Time for bed, children,’ and watched as Bridget pushed the heavy pram awkwardly across the grass. Sylvie sighed and Hugh helped her up from her chair, bussing her cheek once she was on her feet.
Sylvie propped open the tiny skylight window in the baby’s stuffy room. They called it the ‘nursery’ but it was no more than a box tucked into a corner of the eaves, airless in summer and freezing in winter, and thereby totally unsuitable for a tender infant. Like Hugh, Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life. (The loss of a nice house in Mayfair, a beloved pony, a faith in an omniscient deity.) She sat on the button-backed velvet nursing chair and fed Edward. ‘Teddy,’ she murmured fondly as he gulped and choked his way to sated sleep. Sylvie liked them all best as babies, when they were shiny and new, like the pink pads on a kitten’s paw. This one was special though. She kissed the floss on his head.
Words floated up in the soft air. ‘All good things must come to an end,’ she heard Hugh say as he escorted Lily and Margaret indoors to dinner. ‘I believe the poetically inclined Mrs Glover has baked a skate. But first, perhaps you would care to see my Petter engine?’ The women twittered like the silly schoolgirls they still were.
Ursula was woken by an excited shouting and clapping of hands. ‘Electricity!’ she heard one of Sylvie’s friends exclaim. ‘How wonderful!’
She shared an attic room with Pamela. They had matching small beds with a rag rug and a bedside cabinet in between. Pamela slept with her arms above her head and sometimes cried out as if pricked with a pin (a horrible trick Maurice was fond of). On one side of the bedroom wall was Mrs Glover who snored like a train and on the other side Bridget muttered her way through the night. Bosun slept outside their door, always on guard even when asleep. Sometimes he whined softly but whether in pleasure or pain they couldn’t tell. The attic floor was a crowded and unquiet sort of place.
Ursula was woken again later by the visitors taking their leave. (‘That child is an unnaturally light sleeper,’ Mrs Glover said, as if it were a flaw in her character that should be corrected.) She climbed out of bed and padded over to the window. If she stood on a chair and looked out, something they were all expressly forbidden to do, then she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. Hugh stood at the back gate, waiting to escort them along the lane to the station.
Sometimes Bridget walked the children to the station to meet their father off the train when he came home from work. Maurice said he might be an engine driver when he was older, or he might become an Antarctic explorer like Sir Ernest Shackleton who was about to set sail on his grand expedition. Or perhaps he would simply become a banker, like his father.
Hugh worked in London, a place they visited infrequently to spend stilted afternoons in their grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead, a quarrelsome Maurice and Pamela ‘fraying’ Sylvie’s nerves so that she was always in a bad mood on the train home.
When everyone had left, their voices fading into the distance, Sylvie walked back across the lawn towards the house, a darkening shadow now as the black bat unfolded his wings. Unseen by Sylvie, a fox trotted purposefully in her footsteps before veering off and disappearing into the shrubbery.
‘Did you hear something?’ Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillows, reading an early Forster. ‘The baby perhaps?’
Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun.
‘No,’ he said.
The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully.
‘The best one yet,’ Hugh said.
‘Yes, I think we should keep this one.’
‘He doesn’t look like me,’ Hugh said.
‘No,’ she agreed amiably. ‘Nothing like you at all.’
Hugh laughed and, kissing her affectionately, said, ‘Good night, I’m turning out my light.’