CRESSIDA CONNOLLY

My Former Heart

Dedication

To Violet, Nell and Gabriel

Epigraph

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart …

From ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ by William Wordsworth

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Cressida Connolly

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Ruth always remembered the day that her mother decided to go away. She didn’t know the actual date, but she recalled the occasion: it was on a wet afternoon early in 1942, during a visit to the cinema. She thought she could even pinpoint the exact moment Iris had made up her mind to go, leaving her only child behind. Neither of them could have guessed then that they would never live together again.

Her mother used to give her a treat after each visit to the dentist. Because the dentist’s rooms were in Devonshire Place, near Regent’s Park, this was quite often a visit to the zoo. But the zoo had shut down by then. The animals had been sent to the country, partly to keep them safe, but partly to keep people safe from them. No one knew what might happen if the zoo got hit and some of the animals escaped. Ruth tried to imagine what it would be like to meet a lion ambling down Albany Street, or a rhinoceros thudding along the towpath of the canal, where she had walked with her mother and father the summer before. She thought it would be frightening, but not as frightening as the Egyptian mummies they’d been to see at the British Museum. She was glad the museum had closed and she didn’t have to go there again.

Once, they had met up with an old friend of her mother’s, a lady called Jocelyn who designed costumes for the theatre and who had eyes which stuck out like a pug’s. Iris said that her friend was fun, but their lunch together had not been a treat; or at least not for Ruth. Jocelyn had said that she didn’t want to be married, ever; and she certainly, absolutely, didn’t want a family of her own.

‘I dislike children intensely,’ she drawled, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards at her own wit. ‘They have no conversation.’

Ruth had been shocked that her mother had laughed. It had never occurred to her that anyone might choose not to have children, let alone not enjoy their company. Everyone wanted to get married and have bridesmaids and a lovely dress: that was what you did when you grew up. And when you got married you had children and a kidney-shaped dressing table all of your own, with little silver-lidded glass jars full of hairpins, and others packed with cotton wool. You had scent in a bottle with a cloth-covered rubber squisher on its side, and a swan’s-down powder puff which sat separated from its powder by a disc with holes in, like the ones on soap dishes, so that the feather filaments of the powder puff did not become clogged. That was how things worked.

But this time, after Ruth’s teeth had been looked at – she couldn’t later remember whether she’d had to have any drilled that day – her mother took her to Oxford Street, to the cinema. The cinema was the Studio One and it had a swirly carpet, with a pattern which was meant to look like spools of film unravelling. The feature was a new cartoon from America about a baby elephant, but first there was a newsreel. Whenever Mr Churchill appeared everyone in the cinema gave a cheer. There were pictures of men getting their trousers wet as they got off landing craft, and of people waving, and of tanks, and the voice which described it all was very cheerful and urgent. Iris was hardly watching the newsreel though, because she was looking in her bag for change so she could send Ruth to get some cigarettes from the usherette, and some sweets. Before the war there would have been ices, but you couldn’t get ices by then.

Iris was always rummaging in her bag, looking for a book match or a pencil, inclining her head, an escaping curl of dark hair, like a question mark, falling over one eye. Eight-year-old Ruth went and fetched the cigarettes for her mother and a small white paper bag of sweets for herself and came back to the seats with them. Now the newsreel was showing some pictures from the desert, and she could feel that her mother was concentrating on them, because there was a sort of tightness about her. When General Montgomery came onto the screen, he got an even louder cheer than the Prime Minister had had. The screen showed men in uniform marching about and then more of them, queuing with trays, outside a big tent, while others stood around a tall van in the background. Then suddenly Iris was on her feet and hissing in a loud whisper, ‘Stay here, Ruth. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Ruth supposed she must have needed to go to the lavatory. Lots of people all along the row had to stand up so Iris could get past. Ruth would have felt a little embarrassed about disturbing people, but Iris never minded about that sort of thing.

She seemed to be gone for a long time. The film started and Ruth was a bit frightened because the story began with a lot of thunder and lightning and she was afraid of storms. She consoled herself by trying to concentrate on not chewing her sweets, holding them against the roof of her mouth with her tongue until they dissolved and her mouth was flooded with their sugary flavour. On the screen big birds with long beaks brought baby animals down from the clouds, wrapped in what looked like towels. This troubled her. No one had ever mentioned to her the role of storks in bringing babies into the world, so she did not understand what these gawky birds had to do with the arrival of children. It was all very quick and muddling. Next there were animals going two by two, which made her think the film was going to be about Noah and the Flood. But the story turned out to be about a circus, travelling along in a little train. The train got puffed out when it went uphill. Ruth put another sweet into her mouth. Still Iris had not come back to her seat.

Now there was a baby elephant with big ears, who made friends with a mouse. The mouse was kind, but the other elephants were not. They were standoffish and then they ganged up. It wasn’t fair. The baby wasn’t allowed to see its mother because she’d turned fierce, but the kind mouse took the baby to where the mother was – in a sort of prison – and the mother reached her trunk between the bars and rocked her funny little baby. This was so sad that Ruth began to cry.

The one thing she could never remember was at what point her mother came back to her seat. ‘There was a funny – I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha – bit in the film, when suddenly the proper story stopped and there were lots of pink elephants with empty eye sockets doing dances together, and what looked like ice-skating,’ she told her own daughters many years later. ‘I felt scared of them because of the eyes being hollow, like a skeleton’s. My mother must have been back in her seat by then, because I remember putting my hand on her arm for reassurance and it was then I noticed that she was crying. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, but she had tears on her face. She hardly ever cried. She rubbed her cheek with her fist, roughly. I guessed she was crying about the poor baby elephant, as I had. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” I whispered, “it’s only a film, it’s not real.” Pathetic, really, to have thought she was crying about the cartoon. And she smiled a little smile.’

The baby elephant became a tremendous success in the circus and was allowed to be with his mother again, in a special railway carriage all of their own. That was the end, and everyone got up to go, buttoning up their coats, the women pulling on their gloves, but Iris stayed in her seat. ‘They’re going to show the newsreel again now,’ she told Ruth. ‘I must just have another look, you see.’ She lit a cigarette and sat back, while a new audience in different coats shuffled into their seats. Before long the same newsreel started. Landing craft, troops waving, tanks, the Prime Minister, the desert, the same men standing in the same queue outside the same tent, smiling, with the same men behind them around the truck. Suddenly Iris leant forward and tensed, as if she were a cat about to pounce on some buzzing thing.

At once Ruth guessed why. It must have been because her mother had seen Ruth’s father, Edward, on the newsreel. Ruth herself had not spotted him on the screen, and over the months that followed she wondered why not; why Iris had been able to see him and she had not. She was sure she loved him quite as much as her mother did; wanted to see him just as much. She thought she must have looked away, at the precise moment, to have missed him. Perhaps she had been looking down into her dwindling sweets, licking her finger to catch the grains of sugar sprinkled in the bottom of the bag, concentrating on not spilling any onto the knobbly wool of her coat.

After that they did not stay until the end of the newsreel. They went out into the foyer and Iris spoke to the cinema manager. On their way home she told Ruth that she’d already talked to this man, when she first went out, before the cartoon had started. She’d wanted him to show the newsreel again, then, straight away. He had told her that this often happened to people: they thought they recognised a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. He always asked them to stay on and watch the newsreel again, at the end of the feature, to make sure. Sometimes – usually, he was sorry to say – it turned out not to be who they thought it was after all. But if, after a second viewing, they were quite sure, then the manager would try and obtain a still photograph from the newsreel company. So after she’d seen it for a second time, Iris was able to describe the scene in the newsreel exactly, to make sure he’d get the right picture. She gave the manager her name and address. He said he would do his best.

Ruth was used to her mother getting what she wanted; it was just another thing about Iris. Ruth supposed it was because her mother was pretty. She had long arms and legs, with the thinnest ankles and wrists, like a whippet; and wide pale-hazel eyes with gold flecks in them. Once a friend of her father’s – his name was Bunny Turner – had come to lunch and stayed on for most of the afternoon. Iris had gone upstairs to the drawing room to get a second bottle from the drinks tray. As he was leaving he’d taken Ruth’s shoulders in his hands and looked her intently in the face. ‘You must take good care of your mother,’ he’d said; ‘she’s a captivating woman.’ Ruth didn’t like that word: it sounded like captive-taking, like the poor boys Captain Hook had taken prisoner in Peter Pan. But she was used to people thinking that her mother was wonderful.

Before the incident in the cinema, it had never occurred to Ruth that her mother might have been worrying that Edward was dead. She had certainly never said so. Anyway, people protected children from such fears. Ruth knew from talking to her friends that grown-ups didn’t tell children very much, certainly not bad things. During the worst of the bombing raids, when Ruth was six and seven, Iris had bought a pale-green silk moiré box full of rose and violet creams from Fortnum’s, to take into the coal hole in front of the kitchen, where they waited out the raids. They never ate the chocolates otherwise: they were a treat reserved for the shelter. Iris had taken an eiderdown into the coal hole – it had been ruined, covered in black smudges – and a blanket for them to huddle under, and they’d eaten the chocolates together, waiting in the cramped blackness for the all-clear to be sounded. Iris had made a game of it: which was more delicious, the soapy rose or the chalky, fragrant violet? Ruth had had to concentrate, taking tiny nibbles out of first one then the other. They could never decide. Iris never said anything about being frightened in all those times, even when bombs landed nearby, which had happened more than once. She never seemed afraid of anything.

Courage came easily to Iris, but happiness was more difficult. This was something that Ruth sometimes glimpsed in her mother: a sudden plunge, as if the temperature had dropped, when Iris would sit smoking in her chair, without a book or sewing, hardly speaking. Ruth’s father, Edward, had an aptitude for happiness – a gift, Iris called it – like being musical, or having a good head for numbers. For Iris happiness was something delicious but hard to keep hold of, like the almost-pins-and-needles sherberty feeling when summer air dries seawater on your skin. Ruth thought this was why Iris made decisions so abruptly, in the same way as she snapped shut her powder compact. It was as if she were trying to catch happiness in a trap.

Ruth didn’t know if the cinema manager ever sent the photograph. She never saw it if he did. But she believed that Iris had made her mind up that afternoon at the cinema, when they were both, for their different reasons, crying in the flickering dark. Because three days later, Iris took her daughter to Paddington station and put her on the train. And then, even before the guard had walked the length of the platform to close all the doors, before the flag was waved or the whistle went, she was gone.

Ruth liked her grandparents’ house in Malvern, except that she missed her mother and she did not like the cold, or the henhouse. She loved her grandparents, both of them; their soft voices and their routine and quiet kindness. In the evenings, before supper, her grandfather sometimes read to her, adventures by Rider Haggard and Erskine Childers, or stories by Kipling. Ruth was mousier, less emphatic, than her mother, with a sturdier frame; she felt at home with her grandparents. Even so, there were occasions when the cold was so cold as to be indistinguishable from misery: sometimes, when she cried at night, even she could not have said whether it was from missing her mother or because she could not get warm. London had been cold too, but the rooms were smaller and her mother had taken to lighting a coal fire downstairs in the kitchen grate and staying in there, where it could be made warm, even if it was not so comfortable as the first-floor sitting room.

The house at Malvern had high-ceilinged rooms with big Victorian sash windows, to make the most of the view. Before the war there had been log fires in every grate, but now there was only a one-bar electric fire in the drawing room, which would be unplugged and brought to stand in the grate of the breakfast room before they ate. But it was only ever switched on just before they came in to sit down, more a formality than an actual heating appliance. And there was never enough hot water to get really warm in the bath. Ruth developed chilblains, which made her toes tickle, then throb and burn. Until Mrs Jenkins, who came in to clean every morning, took the potty Ruth used at night and – horrifyingly – dipped a linen hand towel into the urine and dabbed Ruth’s toes with it, bringing an exquisite but temporary relief, like a dock leaf on a nettle sting.

The house, like the town of which it formed a part, stood in the lee of a western slope. Even as a child Ruth was aware of the way that the whole place fell into shadow, as the sun slipped behind the hulk of the hills. But she liked the way you could still see a wide band of sunlight, sliding perceptibly across the lawn like the train of a wedding dress, away from her grandparents’ house towards the distant abbey towns, with their wide rivers and gentle slopes of ancient orchards. She imagined the sun was still shining in London, long after Malvern had fallen into shade.

Her grandparents were her father’s parents, although it was her mother who had sent her to stay with them. Iris’s mother was alive, but she lived outside Sidmouth, a long way away, and her house was thought to be unsuitable for children; no one ever explained why. Ruth hardly ever saw this grandmother, who had been a widow for years and smelled of tobacco and face powder – dry smells, musty, like the bottom of an old handbag. But she had often stayed with her Malvern grandparents before. She and Iris had spent several weeks there together, towards the end of 1940, during the worst of the Blitz. In the winter the mottled colours of rock, dead bracken and gorse made the hills look like giant slabs of Christmas cake. Iris had played cards with her father-in-law after dinner each evening, while his wife added pieces to the jigsaw which was accumulating slowly on the writing table in the window.

Ruth had shared a room with her mother during that visit. Before bed, Iris always pinned her hair into tight coils with kirby grips, so that it would curl the next day. While she sat doing her hair she would talk to her daughter in a loud whisper; so loud, it seemed to Ruth, that it would have been better – quieter – if she had spoken in her normal voice.

‘Why does your grandmother have to do those enormous puzzles?’ she asked one evening. Ruth could tell it wasn’t really a question.

‘I don’t know. Why shouldn’t she?’

‘Well, darling, because they take so long. I mean, an eternity.’

‘She likes it, I s’pose. She likes it that they take ages.’

‘Well, obviously. But if one’s going to do jigsaws at all, at least do them of places further away. Why spend weeks at a time doing a yard-long picture of Bourton-on-the-Water, or the swans on the river at Stratford? Why not just go and see the real thing?’

‘It’s not to do with the places. It’s to do with finding the pieces,’ said Ruth.

‘Exactly,’ said Iris, dragging out the second syllable as if it were a cigarette she was drawing on. ‘It’s just that one might think they’d have had enough of the wretched damp countryside, looking at it from practically every window. One would think she’d want to do a puzzle of somewhere a bit more dashing. Monte Carlo. Or the Alps even.’

Ruth thought for a moment. ‘I don’t believe Granny wants to be dashing,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said Iris, ‘yes.’

Ruth’s uncle Christopher had come back to live with her grandparents for the duration. He was teaching science at the Malvern Boys College. Or at least he said he was, and it was true that he was a teacher. It was only years later that Ruth learned that he’d actually been involved in developing signals and radar, based at the evacuated school. He hadn’t been able to enlist because of his poor eyesight, although he was better at seeing things than anyone his niece knew: he could spot a buzzard from miles away, and tell it from a hawk. He knew the names of all the birds and wild flowers. Ruth liked birds, except for chickens. Soon after she arrived, Christopher began to take her for long walks on the hills at weekends. With her stumpy legs and her thick springy hair, she reminded him of a valiant little pony. He knew the secret places where you could drink the icy spring water straight from the rock, so clear that it tasted more like air – exhilarating, like sea air – than water. Christopher was an expert whistler, could whistle any tune, however elaborate. For some reason which Ruth did not understand this annoyed his mother.

It was not yet spring when Ruth arrived at Malvern. That first night she pulled her bed away from the wall and wrote ‘mummy and daddy’ in her neatest writing on the wallpaper, below the line of the mattress, where no one would be able to see it. It was intended as a sort of spell, to make them come back.

Gradually, over the weeks, the cold began to give way to thin sunlight. The early wallflowers in her grandparents’ garden smelled of watery marzipan then, as if the summer to come was hidden inside them. There was a tall monkey puzzle tree outside her bedroom window, and Ruth used to wish that she could find a real-life monkey and open her window and put it out on a branch, to see how puzzled it would be, or whether it would be able to climb down. When she ran her hands along one of the branches, little barbs at the end of each leaf stabbed at her fingers.

Neither of her grandparents asked questions about her mother. They didn’t really ask questions about anything much: they didn’t interfere. They weren’t strict, except about manners, table manners in particular. The table was always laid properly. Everyone had their own big white napkin, rolled up inside a silver ring; and there were special little spoons made of mother-of-pearl for the salt; and spoons made of horn, with long handles, for boiled eggs. There were fruit knives with coloured glass handles, like polished beads, and in summer there were crescent-shaped salad plates. There were two pheasants made of silver as a centrepiece; or, as the weather improved, stiff flowers in a cut-glass bowl which had a mesh made of wire, like a stiffened hairnet, to keep them in place. In London, when it was just her and Ruth, Iris had got into the habit of doing without side plates, or napkins, or butter knives: she couldn’t see much point, since there wasn’t enough butter in the first place. She even put the jam on the table in the jar it came from the shop in, though not if there were visitors.

Iris never wore a wristwatch, didn’t even keep a clock beside the bed, as if she could outwit time by refusing to keep an eye on it. There was only one clock in their house in London, a wind-up one, in the kitchen. But in the house in Malvern there were two long-case clocks, so that if you listened hard you could always hear ticking wherever you were, except in the bathroom with the taps running. Both clocks chimed the quarter-hours, and the smaller walnut clock in the breakfast room appeared to pause momentarily, as if drawing in its breath, before chiming always very slightly ahead of the bigger mahogany clock in the hall. In this house time was ordered, it announced itself politely and was made quietly welcome. Nothing was hasty.

Ruth found the not knowing how long her mother would be away far worse than her absence itself. It was like not knowing whether you’d be staying somewhere long enough to unpack your suitcases properly and unfold all your things and put them in drawers: it made it difficult to settle. After the first two weeks her uncle Christopher made arrangements for her to attend a school further up the hill in the town. Most of the children who had come to Malvern to get away from London had gone home by then, but three evacuees were still there. Ruth was glad to hear their familiar London voices, but they were a tight-knit group, not looking to make extra friends. Out on walks, Ruth had seen the little African princesses who went to school on the other side of the hill. It was said that their father was the King of Abyssinia and that they were descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. She wondered if they were lonely, so far from home. In her class she liked a girl called Veronica, who had long plaits the colour of dust caught in sunlight. Veronica owned a pair of real tap-dancing shoes, which she sometimes allowed Ruth to try on.

Every afternoon her uncle collected Ruth from the school gate and they walked home together, looking at trees and birds along the way. Christopher liked things that other people didn’t care for, as well as noticing things that other people didn’t even see. He told her about crows, how clever they were, how long-lived. People generally feared them, because they were ominous and ate carrion and cawed so loudly, but he enjoyed looking at their tip-tilting jaunty way of walking. He pointed out the flash of blue under a magpie’s wing and told her it was a useful lesson to remember: that even when things looked black and white, they could still surprise you. Magpies looked showy but they were thieves, they took songbirds’ eggs and they made a horrid noise that sounded like mockery. Plumage wasn’t everything.

At half past four tea would be waiting for them: paste sandwiches, bread and butter spread with red jam; or sometimes, as a treat, extra thinly sliced and sprinkled with demerara sugar. Then there would be a piece of the sponge cake which was baked once a fortnight; only a small piece, because it used up such a lot of fat and sugar. It was a matter of pride to Ruth’s grandmother that there should be cake despite the shortages, as if she was not bowing to the Enemy by allowing standards to fall.

A few chickens were kept in an outhouse behind the shrubbery, and once the warmer weather came there was never a shortage of eggs. This was meant to be tremendously lucky, but Ruth had secretly gone off eggs, since being given the task of collecting them, most mornings. She hated the sweetly rotting smell in the henhouse, and covered her nose with her elbow when she went in. She thought she detected something almost snakelike in the furtive sideways glances of the chickens. Once, she found a hen with a dead mouse in its beak, shaking the little corpse as if to loosen its skin, like someone impatient to take a damp overcoat from a guest. After that she found it hard to swallow the runny boiled eggs she was given for breakfast once or twice a week. An egg fluffed up and hidden in a cake was not so bad.

And then two letters came from Iris. She was in Cairo, which gave Ruth a shock. One was addressed to her grandmother, who did not open it at breakfast, but went into her husband’s study with it afterwards, shutting the door quietly behind her. The other was for Ruth.

Darling girl,

It is all the greatest fun here with people from all over the place, New Zealand and Australia and goodness knows where else. I think I may be able to stay on and do my bit to help out, so I hope you will settle nicely with Granny for the time being and be a good girl. I know you will.

One can find all sorts of things in the market, which they call a souk. Queer kinds of fruits like pomegranates and also great vats of powdered dyes in bright colours. Lots of odd-smelling spices in big sacks. Such a change from dreary old London! They drink a kind of tea which is made of mint leaves, rather good.

I’ve seen several camels! Close to they have the longest eyelashes, and when they stand up they make a complaining noise, rather like an old drawer being opened.

Darling, it will do you good, being in the country. I’m sure your uncle will teach you all about nature while you are there, so that you’ll have lots to tell me when I get home. On no account let him take you to watch cricket when the summer begins! It is absolutely deadly, tell him I absolutely forbid it.

When you write, Granny will address the envelope for you to be extra sure your letter reaches me, I’ve sent her the poste restante.

With lots of love,

Mummy

For the time being. What did that mean? Did it mean weeks, or months? She had mentioned cricket and the summer: did that mean Ruth might be here until the summer, or throughout the summer, until autumn came? What could she possibly be doing that would help the war? Iris could type and she was quick at things, but she hadn’t had a job in London. Ruth wasn’t sure that her mother had ever worked at anything. And most importantly she didn’t say whether she’d found Edward. The fact that she didn’t, Ruth reasoned, must mean that she had not. But surely that was why her mother had gone away in the first place, to look for him? So why was she staying on? Why didn’t she carry on travelling, looking for him? Or simply come home?

Ruth didn’t like to ask her grandmother about these things because she thought, although her grandmother didn’t show it, she must have been fearfully worried to have a son missing in the war: so worried that it was never mentioned. Instead she waited until after school, when she was alone with her uncle Christopher. But unusually for Christopher, who was so good at explaining things, he offered no clarification. ‘I really couldn’t say,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure your mother has her reasons.’ Ruth felt a thin trickle of disappointment spreading down her body. It lodged in her chest, like a boiled sweet swallowed the wrong way. That night in bed, she curled the side of her mattress back, so as to reveal the words she had written on the wallpaper. She looked and looked at them, until the letters blurred.

Chapter 2

Even before she had opened her eyes, Iris could sense the brightness at the window, a weight to the light which could only come from snow. The room was cold, much colder than the nights in Cairo had been, but Iris didn’t feel the cold despite her slender frame. The old hotel had been quite empty when they’d first taken it over a few months earlier, hadn’t even had the benefit of electricity or running water. During the big snowstorm, before she’d arrived, they’d run out of kerosene for the lamps. But supplies had begun to arrive and the place was taking shape. They had furnished her room adequately, even if the furniture was shabby. There was a writing table in front of the window, which would do as a dressing table too; and a good comfortable chair with a footstool, set by a low table with a rather dingy lamp; and plenty of clothes hangers in a cupboard which smelled vaguely of cloves. Not that she had all that many clothes with her, certainly not enough warm things for up here in the mountains. She’d have to write to Jocelyn, the friend with whom she’d left a key to the London house, and get her to send some things out: jerseys and her tweed coat and perhaps a couple of dresses for the evenings. One of the things Jimmy was keen for her to do, once they got the place fully established, was to organise entertainments for the men, music and suchlike. It wouldn’t hurt to have a frock or two.

Jimmy was a friend of Edward and Bunny’s, from Cambridge days. It had been pure chance running into him in Cairo. Iris had had no idea he was out in the M.E., although one came across so many familiar faces out here – people one used to run into, for ever ago, at London parties – that she hadn’t been the least bit surprised to see him. Jimmy had always been one for the most tremendous schemes, and mad on skiing of course. Terrifically good at it too. In Cairo he’d told her that he was recruiting for a mountain-training school in the Lebanon. It was just the sort of ambitious, almost foolhardy scheme one would have expected of him. When he mentioned that he was looking for someone to help with the office side of things – to go through lists of men with experience of cold-weather conditions, get in touch with them, order equipment – she at once proposed herself. ‘Done,’ he’d said straight away, grinning. He didn’t enquire as to the particulars of why or how Iris had got to Cairo, nor what she was doing there in the first place. He didn’t ask if she’d ever done this sort of work before, or any work. He wasn’t that sort of person.

The Cedars was on a plateau surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains, all covered in snow. Far in the distance, six thousand feet down beyond the valley, was a glimpse of the Mediterranean. The old hotel took its name from a wood nearby, where some of the trees were said to be more than a thousand years old. There was a wall around it to protect the trees. If Iris had thought of the Lebanon at all before now, it would always have been in connection with the cedars which reached their long wide arms across familiar English lawns, shading the grass, their branches the colour of green baize. But here, in their homeland, nearly all the trees had been cut down, all but this small wood near the hotel. Great swathes of snow collected in their outstretched branches, then fell when the weight became too much for the trees to support. The sound was just like bombs, exploding in the distance. Iris had thought it was a raid the first time she’d heard it, until Jimmy put her right.

Jimmy told her that you could spend the morning skiing up here and then drive down to the coast to bathe in the sea that very afternoon. Not that his notion had much opportunity to be tested, when he and the men were out for almost eight hours a day, sometimes overnighting in tents further up in the mountains, coming back exhausted and frozen. Iris did get down to Beirut every few weeks, but she didn’t bathe, although she’d have liked to. The women there didn’t seem to; there were only men with fishing nets and young boys playing on the beach.

There were already signs of spring down in the city, the almond trees in blossom. It wasn’t so much fun as Cairo of course, but one could dine reasonably well and buy French scent and other treats, and go dancing if one was overnighting. Generally one or other of the officers took her to lunch at the French club, where they had heavenly food: there were even prawns in that delicious pinkish sauce, and sole meunière. Jimmy told her that he’d caused the most frightful embarrassment the first time he’d been to the club. British officers hadn’t been using the place then, but because he’d been doing some liaison for one of the Free French generals he didn’t see why he shouldn’t. He’d gone in and asked for a table, but once he was sitting down he noticed a deathly hush had descended. It turned out he was sitting in the Vichy half of the dining room. He’d been asked to move to the Free French side, and only then had conversation resumed at the other tables. Now the place was frequented by all the English officers. Some of them gave Iris to understand that they disapproved of the ski school. Why should Jimmy – and the Aussies he’d somehow managed to inveigle his way among – be allowed to create a private holiday camp in the mountains? Iris laughed. ‘You should come up,’ she told them. ‘Anything less like a holiday could scarcely be imagined.’

True though this may have been for the men who trained there, to Iris the place did provide a kind of extended vacation, a break from thinking about what to do with her life. Not that she didn’t work, and work hard. There was a great deal to get done: wood for the skis to be ordered from Turkey, supplies to be organised, the men’s letters to send out, reports to be typed up. The whole building smelled as if it was constantly being polished – a familiar and comfortingly English church-hall smell of beeswax and paraffin – but the floors remained scuffed, for these ingredients were used only to make wax for the skis. The furniture was anyway too makeshift to merit polishing. One of the tasks which fell to Iris was to ensure that there were always adequate supplies to make the ski wax. Graphite was another ingredient, which it eventually became impossible to track down; in the end, she’d had to request a huge pile of gramophone records, which they’d ground down, to add to the wax mixture. To Iris this seemed a pity, a waste of music. One of the officers had a wireless, which picked up music stations from Germany and Italy, and before long Jimmy managed to obtain a gramophone from somewhere. When further boxes of gramophone records arrived, Iris kept back some of the better ones to play in the evenings.

Iris often had headaches from spending so long at her desk. But she was glad to be tired and found that she no longer felt restless or on edge. She didn’t have to fret here, as she had at home, about what would happen when Edward came back, how she would explain herself. And it was better for Ruth to be with her grandmother, away from the damp foggy city, in the fresh air; and away from the danger of the city of course. Several people – including her own mother – had let it be known that they’d thought it selfish of Iris to keep the little girl in London with her during the bombing raids.

A couple of doctors had been imported to the school, since fractures and sprains were expected to be a daily occurrence, especially among men who’d never skied before. In fact hardly anyone hurt themselves: Jimmy’s theory was that it helped to actually climb up a mountain before you skied down it, because that way you were strengthening the muscles first. He believed that it was because there were no ski lifts here that people didn’t seem to get hurt as they did in the Alps. But they did get sunburn. Snow blindness too. The Australians in particular were averse to using protective cream or dark glasses. Sometimes at night Iris was kept awake by their horrible screams of pain from the hospital ward across the courtyard.

One of the doctors, Digby Richards, had a friend nearby, a naturalist who was stationed down by the coast, collecting things for the Natural History Museum in London. Digby was going to meet this friend in Tripoli when he next had a day off duty: would Iris like to join them, he wondered, and see the crusader castle? Digby didn’t say much on the drive down, but his friend Michael turned out to be excellent company. The spring weather was a delightful contrast to the snow at the Cedars. Michael had arranged an exotic picnic for them: flat bread more like Bath Olivers than the bread at home, and salty cheese – which he said was made from goat’s milk, but which Iris liked nevertheless – and some olives, with a bottle of red wine from Cyprus. After they’d eaten Michael wandered off, head bowed, while Iris and Digby sat on the coarse grass and looked at the sea, smoking in silence. Within minutes Michael returned with a posy of flowers in his hands.

‘For you,’ he said, pretending to produce the flowers from behind his back with an elaborate flourish.

‘Well, thank you,’ said Iris, smiling.

‘If you care to examine the specimens, you will note that there are several types of iris among them,’ Michael went on, as if he were a teacher and Iris his pupil.

‘Really? I wouldn’t have known. I only know the blue kind that you get in England. Oh, and those rather ugly tall brownish ones with yellow bits. I never care for them much; they look like dead leaves.’

‘These are Mediterranean ones. And wild. They’re quite different.’

‘This looks like a cornflower.’

‘Good girl! It is a close relative, yes. And this one is of course a kind of daisy.’

Iris held the flowers to her nose, inhaling their trace of scent, not floral as much as like hay and blackberries: the smell of faraway English fields in autumn.

Back in the car Michael leant forward from the back seat, telling them things. He said that one of the gorges leading down to the coast was where Adonis had lived, by the source of the river which bore his name. This was where the story of Venus and Adonis came from.

‘It’s terribly romantic, don’t you think?’ he asked Iris, his nose level with her ear so that she could feel his breath, slightly damp, tickling her neck just below her ear lobe. Iris smiled and carried on looking straight ahead.

They stopped at the crusader castle and clambered up, disturbing flicking lizards and fat black beetles as they climbed. The mossy walls were covered in honeysuckle, the honeysuckle busy with sparrows.

‘What will you do when the war’s over?’ Digby asked her, the first question he’d put to her all day.

‘I don’t know. Go home, I s’pose. Carry on as before.’ She was aware of how ungracious she sounded, but a sudden lurch of feeling made her monosyllabic: even as she spoke the words, she knew that she would not be able to continue with her old life. The idea of that life filled her now with panic. There was nothing terrible about it, it was pleasant enough: she had a kind husband, a comfortable house, a child. But to Iris it all felt terribly wrong, as if she’d caught the wrong train and was now speeding, unstoppably, towards a destination miles and miles away from where she was meant to be. She could feel the colour coming to her cheeks and hoped her companions would not notice her blushing. ‘What about you?’ she said.

‘I’d like to travel. I’ve met some super fellows from New Zealand. Might go there for a time, see if I can help out at a hospital.’

‘Nonsense!’ Michael interjected. ‘I know you, Digby. You’ll be tucked up safe and sound up north, same as ever. It’ll be a local practice: elderly ladies in narrow-brimmed hats with varicose veins, farmers with bunions. Anything for a quiet life.’

Digby grinned. ‘We’ll see.’

After the picnic she barely saw Digby for days. Two hundred Greeks arrived at the school, as well as a detachment from the SBS. The doctors had plenty to do, giving them all the once-over before they were sent out to train in the snow, and there was a lot of paperwork for Iris. When Digby appeared at the door of the room she used as an office, to ask whether she’d like to make up a four at bridge after dinner that night, she felt inordinately pleased to see him, as if they’d known one another for years. There was something very endearing about him, she found: his almost absurd height and the prominent bone in the bridge of his nose made him resemble a rather solemn wading bird. She liked his voice and his rather shy sidelong smile. She was fond of Jimmy, but he was always so busy and caught up with running things and anyway he was really from Edward’s past life more than hers. It was nice to find a new friend. This was the first time Iris had made a friend of a man: although she knew men, and liked them, they were generally friends of her husband’s or the husbands of her friends. Or else they hadn’t been friends but boyfriends, which was quite a different thing. Digby was the first man she’d ever made friends with on her own account. Most evenings after that they played cards, and when they had days or afternoons off they went down to the sea somewhere or to a café in a town. Occasionally Michael joined them, reminding Iris what it was like to be flirted with.

‘Has anyone ever told you what marvellous eyes you have?’ Michael asked her, one afternoon.

‘Now, what would you think?’ she said.

‘I think yes. But I bet no one’s told you what colour they are.’

‘No?’ She smiled.

‘Aventurine.’ He looked very pleased with himself, as if he’d produced a winning hand at cards.

‘But that’s cheating!’ exclaimed Iris. ‘I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it looks like.’

‘It looks like your eyes is the thing. It’s tawny-coloured glass, with flecks of gold in it.’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘It is. You are.’

Iris blushed.

As the spring went on, the snow around the Cedars began to shrink back, exposing ever wider strips of bare, rocky ground. The school was to remain open for the early part of the summer at least, training men in other aspects of mountain warfare, such as rock climbing. One morning, when Iris was at her desk, Digby came in without knocking.

‘Quick! You absolutely must come at once!’ he told her.

She stood up, flustered.

‘Where? What’s happened?’

‘It’s nothing to worry about. Not anything like that, but you must come. Outside. Quickly.’

She followed him along the corridor, out into the courtyard and round the side of the building to a spot where they could see straight down the valley, which sloped away towards the sea. There were already a number of people standing about, looking. And then Iris saw what they were staring at: below them, suspended in the air, hung a great dark cloud which writhed and tumbled in the cool air.

‘Look,’ said Digby, pointing.

‘Goodness!’ said Iris. ‘What on earth is it? Not locusts surely?’

‘If it’s a swarm of bees we might be well advised to get out of the line of fire,’ someone said.

‘They’re too big to be bees.’

‘You don’t think they’re bats, do you?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Are they wee birds?’ someone asked.

‘They must be,’ someone else said.

Everyone stood still as the cloud danced closer and closer, until it was possible to discern individual shapes among its mass. Spots of colour on their wings flashed as they caught the sunlight; others were only white, fluttering upward like handkerchiefs blown from a washing line, caught in a current of air.

‘Butterflies!’ Iris laughed, delighted.

There must have been hundreds of thousands of them, some flying only a few inches above the ground, others as high as a three-storey house. They flew up onto the plateau and then on, up towards the pass. It was as if some invisible dam had burst, and the butterflies were flooding the sky in a swollen river of flight. Almost as remarkable as the sight of them was the silence: they moved as soundlessly as a great shoal of fish. By and by, everyone in the building came out to look. Some of the men were holding out their hats, catching the butterflies in them as easily as if they had been shrimping nets, dangled in a shallow rock pool. Iris put her arm through Digby’s and they stood looking together.

The butterflies kept coming for two days. Everyone talked of little else. Teams who ventured up towards the col said the upper slopes were littered with dead butterflies, their wings darkening as they blotted the moisture from the ever-retreating snow. Iris and Digby collected several from the ground in the courtyard and put them in cigarette boxes, to take to Michael. He’d be able to identify them, they were sure.

‘You don’t mind, do you, the way Michael goes on?’ Digby asked her, as they drove down to the coast, a week after the butterflies had stopped, with the specimens on the back seat. ‘I mean, you don’t find it tiresome the way he …?’

‘Heavens, no,’ said Iris. ‘It’s all quite good-natured. Anyway, he’s amusing.’

‘But you’re not …’

‘Oh no. Absolutely not.’

‘Because of your husband?’ asked Digby. It was the first time in their friendship that he had mentioned her marriage.

‘Not actually.’ Confiding didn’t come readily to Iris; she preferred to live than to talk, but she felt she could trust Digby, that there was an understanding between them.

‘Look, the thing is that there’s been someone else. Someone since I was married, I mean. It all came to a head last year, while Edward was out of the country on service. Then things got rather complicated because he was sent away suddenly, and I didn’t know where he’d been posted – this other man, not Edward. Then I saw him, I was sure it was him, on a newsreel and it was all rather frantic, and one way or another that led me to Cairo …’

Digby was silent.

‘Oh dear. Do you disapprove?’ asked Iris.

‘No. It’s not that,’ said Digby.

‘The thing is that I didn’t find him, and now I’m not sure that it would have been a good idea anyway. I’m not sure that I want to know where he is after all. I mean as long as he’s all right. I’ve been trying to forget about him. It was too much, you see. He isn’t free either, his wife’s … well, perhaps we needn’t go into that. Anyway, I … I certainly wasn’t thinking that Michael … I mean, it’s the last thing …’

‘No. I should think not.’

‘You’re the only one who knows. Jimmy doesn’t know anything about it, and I’d rather he didn’t,’ she said, suddenly regretting her unaccustomed candour. ‘It’s all been rather a muddle. I know I’m entirely at fault, but …’

‘No, of course. I’ll say nothing.’

After this she began to see rather less of Digby. Their nightly card games somehow stopped, although they still kept each other company, not talking much, when they both had a day’s leave. In due course Michael went back to London. Among his luggage were several crates full of carefully wrapped insects, the shells of gastropods and of other molluscs, seed pods, snakeskins, and the butterflies his friends had brought him. Personnel changed too up at the Cedars; people came and went. By now there was a staff of some hundred ski instructors. Extra buildings had had to go up, to accommodate the two thousand students who were billeted at any one time. Jimmy offered Iris the opportunity to return to England if she wanted to, but she chose to stay on. Ruth was happily installed at her grandparents’, busy with her school and a best friend whom she evidently adored, to judge by how often she was mentioned in letters. It was rather a wrench, being away from her, but it was better for Ruth to have the continuity of her life in Malvern. Iris had learned to ski herself and found it exciting. Also, somewhat to her surprise, she realised how much she liked to work, to be of use. She was in no hurry to go back, uncertain as she remained about her future with Edward. She rather imagined she might end up alone, although the thought no longer troubled her.

But in the spring of 1944, the commanding officer called Iris into his office to tell her the school would be closing down at the end of the season. Half the staff would go on to Italy, to continue their work there; the remainder would be going elsewhere. He was not able to reveal their destination, he informed her rather pompously. The thing was, there would be no post for her as of early summer. Something could be found for her in London if she liked.

Jimmy already knew of course. He was going to miss the place, his dog especially: a local Alsatian had unofficially adopted him soon after he’d arrived, joining in on training exercises, knocking people over. The dog had become a sort of mascot to them all. The commanding officers came and went, but Jimmy had been here all along; the Cedars was really his thing altogether. He and Iris sat disconsolately in his office, smoking.

‘I don’t know what to do with myself quite,’ said Iris. ‘I’ve grown so used to being here, so fond of everyone.’

‘Mountains have a queer effect on people,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’ve noticed that in the mountains one can very easily come to love almost anybody.’

‘Well, I don’t know about anybody,’ said Iris. ‘I’m not sure if I’d have loved Dumpling, if I’d met him at home.’

They laughed. Dumpling was a thickset Italian who worked in the kitchens. He was notoriously bad-tempered. One breakfast, when someone had asked for an egg cooked for a shorter time, he’d made a fearful scene and shouted, ‘If you no like-a – go lumpy!’ It had become something of a catchphrase about the place.

People were leaving by degrees. Jimmy was the first to go. He was to stop in London before joining some of the others in Canada, he’d confided to Iris. Digby was due to leave the week after. On her final evening, after dinner, Digby knocked quietly on the door of her room.

‘These books belong to you,’ he said, handing them to her. ‘And I’ve brought us a nightcap.’ He produced a flask.

‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything we can drink out of. Will my tooth mug do? We’ll have to share it, unless you prefer to drink straight from that.’

‘No, let’s share your glass. So long as it doesn’t taste of toothpaste.’

Iris fetched it. He half filled it with clear liquid and handed her the glass.

‘Heavens! It’s strong. But delicious. It tastes of raspberries.’

‘That’s because it’s made of them. Chap down at the French club gave it to me. Good, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘Very good. It’s wonderful to taste raspberries again, reminds me of England. I’d quite forgotten what they were like. Here,’ and she held out the glass to him.

But instead of taking the glass, he took her wrist in his hand and pulled her gently towards him. Before she had time to protest, his face was against hers. She wondered how his nose would fit, whether it would jab her eye or cheek. Then she noticed the pleasing smell of his skin, like freshly sharpened pencils. As he kissed her, his eyes surprisingly open, she realised that she did not feel indignant or even embarrassed, that in fact she felt nothing but pleasure and did not want him to stop.

‘I didn’t think you …’ she said, as he took the glass from her hand and set it on a table and stepped across the room with her hand in his, pulling her down onto her bed next to him.

‘No, but I do. That is to say, I am,’ he told her, kissing her hair, her face.

They lay side by side in the dark room, their clothes forming puddles of deeper shadow on the floor. Iris could not stop grinning, and she sensed that Digby was doing the same. She felt very wide awake and very, very happy, and the happiness was not a precipice, she realised, but a veranda, somewhere she need not fall from, nor scrabble to hold on to, but a place where she might stay and make herself comfortable. It felt like a sort of homecoming, to be naked beneath the sheets with Digby.

‘Well, there we are,’ said Digby at last, turning towards her.

‘Yes. There we are,’ said Iris. And she took his hand in hers and kissed his knuckles, one by one.

Chapter 3

The air in the house seemed to be heavy with steam and the sweet, rotting smell it carried. The only escape was to stay in the sitting room and open the French windows onto the narrow terrace, even if that did mean letting in the cold Northumbrian air.

‘Goodness, darling! Don’t have those windows open, you’ll make the whole house freeze,’ said Iris, sweeping into the room where Ruth was sitting at the piano. She was pressing single keys with one finger, before singing the eight notes up and then down each scale. She had already noticed, after only three days in the house, that Iris interrupted her whenever she sang or played. The given reason was that the sound might wake the baby, although Ruth wondered if there were not some other motive, as the baby’s room was surely too far for the music to carry. Iris shut the glass doors firmly and went to put a log on the dwindling fire.

‘It’s the smell of the nappies,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s like boiling beetroots mixed with cabbage. It’s worse than school.’

‘It is rather foul,’ Iris agreed, speaking as she always did, as though anything concerned with the practicalities of the baby had nothing to do with her. ‘But the draught’s not good for Birdle, is it, darling?’ she said, addressing the corner of the room, where a pale-grey parrot was watching her from a cage on a tall wooden stand. The bird was treading from foot to foot in agitation at the sight of Iris, who usually opened the cage directly she came into the room, allowing its occupant to clamber beak first out of its confines and about the room at will.

‘Do pipe down!’ said Birdle. The intonation was unmistakably Iris’s. She and Ruth both laughed.

Birdle had been Digby’s wedding present to Iris. The parrot had become extravagantly fond of her, sitting on her shoulder in the evenings, constantly attempting to feed her pieces of seed or nut, quite possibly regurgitated ones. When she played patience Birdle often sidled down her arm to the table and picked up single cards with his beak, one after another, before distributing them at random across the thick felt, spoiling the game. If Digby came near his wife, if he tried to sit beside her on the yellow sofa, Birdle scuttled along the back, head lowered, and bit him. He shrieked whenever Iris came into the room, but only looked slyly and in silence at everyone else. The sole words he spoke were imitations of her. Ruth was secretly rather afraid of Birdle. She had held him once or twice, at arm’s length in case he tried to bite, and been amazed by the lightness of him: it seemed remarkable that so forceful a personality could be contained within so light a frame. Digby found Birdle endlessly comic, despite having been given a bleeding ear lobe on more than one occasion.

Ruth had never been close to a baby before. She had caught glimpses of them, of course: pink little faces buttoned into knitted bonnets, their lower halves neatly tucked beneath ribbon-edged blankets, in their passing prams. But she had never held an infant, or even looked closely at one, until now. It was the Easter holidays of 1948, she was fourteen, and she had come to stay with her mother, to meet the new baby, a child who was, it still seemed astonishing to her to realise, her half-brother.

It was remarkable how little babies could do, except expel repellent things from every orifice, and sleep. The baby couldn’t sit up, or even hold on to anything for more than a few seconds, before the object fell out of its grasp. Neither could it – he, Jamie: she had always to remind herself he would become an actual person, in future – say a word. His limbs waved about, like an upturned May bug. Yet Iris and Digby seemed untroubled by these deficiencies. Ruth did find the infant’s smiles winning, and the way he wriggled his legs in delight when smiled back at, but she dreaded being asked to hold him, dreaded the feel of his squirming body, stronger than you’d think and uncoordinated. Her uncle had once taken her fishing to Lake Vyrny, and her tiny brother reminded her of a fish, flailing in a landing net, as if he were in the wrong element. She didn’t know what she was meant to do with him.

It was all rather disgusting. Luckily Ruth was not expected to attend to the actual care of the child, since Mrs Lockyer came in from Hexham every day to help. But she had been asked to lend a hand here and there. She’d learned that whenever the baby’s nappies were changed, its faeces had to be scraped from the muslin Harrington squares into the lavatory, before the soiled cloths were put into a special bucket with a lid, containing a solution of bluish liquid which smelled like a public swimming bath, only worse. A second bucket, with borax, came next, while the towelling outer nappies went into another, dry, bucket. Thrice a week, Mrs Lockyer boiled the muslins in a large enamel bowl on top of the stove, creating the pervasive brassica-tainted vapour from which no room was spared. It filled the house, like the steam from a suet pudding of dung. When sufficiently boiled, the muslins were reunited with the towelling squares in scalding water, to which soap flakes were added; a thin, waxy film formed on the surface of the milky water as it cooled. Once scrubbed, the squares were rinsed, then squeezed through the wooden rollers of the mangle. Before the squares were pegged out to dry, each one was firmly shaken out – snap snap – with a sound like a flock of pigeons’ wings as they picked up speed in flight. And the infant went through four, sometimes five, nappies every day! It was extraordinary to Ruth that anyone would knowingly have a baby, considering the sheer work hours involved. The rewards seemed too meagre.

Ruth wondered whether Helen would have a baby, too. Despite the manifest disadvantages, she rather hoped that she might; it would give Helen something to occupy herself with. As it was, her stepmother was tremendously busy, but to no apparent purpose, like a bluebottle on a windowsill. She belonged to endless committees; she was a botherer. Ruth tried to like Helen; she wanted her father to be happy and, to judge by Digby’s reaction to the infant Jamie, a child would bring him joy. But sometimes it seemed to his daughter that Edward had plumped for Helen only because she was so unlike Iris. Helen wasn’t sophisticated, or beautiful, or even especially good company, but neither was she selfish or wilful or sharp. Ruth secretly thought that Helen was bossy and rather dull.

On the other hand, Ruth was surprised to find herself very fond of Digby. She knew she shouldn’t be: if it had not been for him, her parents might still have been together, whereas poor Helen was blameless. But she couldn’t help liking him, because he was quiet and clever and kind and he looked like some odd bird, a crane, perhaps. He reminded her of her uncle Christopher, though not to look at: Christopher had a small, straight nose and broad shoulders, like his brother. She had been touched to notice that when Digby came with Iris to take her out from school, or to meet her off a train, his face glowed with pleasure the moment he caught sight of her. He was thoughtful. It was Digby who had installed the piano, even though she was hardly ever at their house, because Ruth was good at music, and liked it. He never told her what to do, whereas Helen made her feel as though she were a small but obdurate problem, which could be solved only by a programme of constant intervention, like repeatedly dabbing at a stain.

Digby’s mother lived nearby with her sister, both of them widows. They were known, collectively, as the Hillbillies. The aunt – Hilary – had been a widow for many more years than she had been a bride, her young husband having been killed during the final weeks of the First World War. There had been no children and she was devoted to Digby, and would keep arriving unannounced to coo at the new baby. She knitted moss-stitch matinée coats for him, with matching rompers. The idea was that she might look after the baby in the mornings, once he was a little bigger, so that Iris could go back to work, arranging Digby’s appointments and driving him on his visits.

‘Do look! Isn’t he killing?’ said Hilary to no one in particular, whenever the baby so much as wriggled.

Ruth was surprised and rather relieved to see that her mother was insensible to this baby worship. She seemed fond of her new son, but she didn’t coo. Iris liked Digby’s relations, especially her mother-in-law Billa, who was bookish and rather gruff and made no secret of the fact that she was fonder of dogs than of babies. But then Iris always liked people who felt no need to apologise for themselves.

Ruth was meant to live up here with Iris half the time and with Edward, near Tewkesbury, for the rest. But she really spent only about a third of the time with her mother. Most of her life seemed to take place at school. On weekend exeats and at half terms it was so much simpler to go to her father’s, because he was less than half an hour away. And then she still stayed in Malvern with her grandparents sometimes. They kept her room for her with her childish things – her teddy and doll’s house and old books – and took her out for tea at the Abbey Hotel on those Saturdays when she wasn’t allowed to stay the night away from school. She didn’t like to hurt their feelings by not visiting, even if she would have preferred to be with Iris.

If someone had asked Ruth where her home was, she would not have known what to answer. Was it at her father’s house, or here with her mother? She liked both houses, each of which was close to a river. Edward’s house had beams and windows with sills so wide you could sit on them, looking through the lattices of lead. An old orchard of plum and gnarled apple trees stood beyond the garden, between the house and the river. This river was wide and sleepy, with shallow muddy sides where swans rested among the reeds, whereas the river by Iris’s house was rocky and dark and urgent, and the water there gave off a cold smell, like mountains. It took ages to get to Iris’s house, down an endless rutted track, fringed in spring with carpets of violets. Iris seemed to have forgotten that she used to find the countryside dreary. Ruth loved the house, which stood quite alone, framed by three old Scots pines, a low stone wall separating it from the sheep-cropped green field which ran down to the river. It was an L-shaped house with slate floors in the older, lower part and wide wooden boards in the eighteenth-century part, which had tall ceilings and windows which went right down to the ground. It was an improbable house, neither a rectory nor a farmhouse, but with something of the character of each. Iris didn’t have very much furniture, which made her rooms look elegant, and she went in for big dramatic arrangements of flowers, or just greenery: a bowl of white peonies fringed with copper-beech leaves, or masses of pussy willow in a tall jug, or in autumn great arching sprays of blackberry and rosehips. At Edward’s house there were plenty of low armchairs and dark, highly polished oak furniture. There were ladder-back chairs, and place mats depicting hunting scenes, and lots of silver cruets, the saltcellars and mustard pots lined with dark-blue glass. Ruth thought that her father’s made a better winter house because it was cosy, but her mother’s house was lovely in the summer.

When Ruth listened to the other girls in her dormitory talking about their visits home – their ponies and Labradors, their tartan picnic rugs folded just so, their endless cousins coming and going to tennis and croquet parties, or to play mah-jong, or to take tea at shaded tables overlooking the lawn – she envied them the simplicity and order of their lives. They all went to point-to-points, or sailing in the Isle of Wight. They all seemed to do the same things and to know what those things were and when you were meant to do them. In her holidays she just shuttled between her parents’ houses, and was expected to amuse herself.

She told only her two best friends at school (and they were sworn to secrecy) that Edward had won custody of her during the divorce. This was because her mother had, shockingly, deserted the marital home. Ruth preferred the rest not to know that her parents were divorced, because it made her feel slightly ashamed. The fact that her father was a respectable country solicitor, and had been decorated in the war, had endeared him to the judge, while Iris’s desertion had prejudiced things against her. Edward had insisted that Ruth spend Christmas every year with him, where they were always joined by his own parents, but otherwise he was magnanimous in allowing his daughter time with her mother: they would divide her equally between them, he said. It hadn’t worked out like that. Ruth did know one or two other girls at school whose parents had divorced, although not anyone in her actual form. So far as she knew, these other girls lived with their mothers. She realised that there was something not quite right about not living with hers, as if Iris were slightly shoddy.

She had to acknowledge privately that Iris was becoming rather eccentric. Her hair was longer than the other mothers’ and she hardly ever wore any pins to contain it: she had given up wearing a hat. Perhaps it had been living abroad which had made her abandon such conventions. She only wore gloves in the dead of winter now, and she never put on any face powder: her face was shiny. And the awful thing was that Iris having the baby did make Ruth feel guiltily put off her mother. Iris was thirty-six, practically geriatric! It was one thing to remarry, but producing a baby was quite another. It wasn’t quite respectable. It meant that Iris still did It, a thought too embarrassing to countenance. Or anyway had done It less than a year before, although not of course since: nobody could be that revolting. It probably wasn’t even possible, biologically. And the worst thing was that everyone at school would know, when their mothers and fathers probably hadn’t done It for years and years.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Iris had said, half to herself, when she was giving Jamie his eleven o’clock bottle in the breakfast room one morning. ‘First I had to get married because I was going to have a baby, and then this time I had to have a baby, because I’d got married.’

‘Mummy!’ said Ruth, shocked. ‘You’ve never said that before.’

‘Haven’t I? Oh, sorry, darling. It doesn’t mean one wasn’t simply thrilled when you appeared. We both were.’

‘But d’you mean to say you were actually having a baby when you and Daddy got married?’ Ruth could feel herself flushing with the horror of it.

‘Well, yes. But I mean it was quite early on. One wasn’t monstrously fat or anything. I had such a pretty dress for the registry office: silk crepe, in a sort of oyster colour. I don’t know what happened to it. Must have got lost during the war.’

‘Is that why there aren’t any photographs from the wedding, because you were pregnant?’

‘Don’t say pregnant, darling, it’s so coarse.’

‘But is it?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Iris. ‘There just wasn’t anyone there with a camera, that’s all. But it was all tremendous fun, on the day.’

‘But that means that I’m illegitimate, practically,’ said Ruth, tears gathering.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Someone either is illegitimate or they aren’t. You can’t be a bit illegitimate, I mean. And you’re not. So there’s nothing to get upset about.’

The thing Ruth liked best about school was the choir. Singing solo wasn’t nearly as good, because it didn’t give you the same sensation; a solo only came from your throat and then out of your mouth, the breath made shallow, even quavery, by nerves. But choral singing went through your whole body, reverberating in your ribcage. With choral singing it was as if you and all the other people you were singing with were one instrument, like the pipes on an organ. A choir was really an orchestra made of voices. When she sang, Ruth sometimes felt a rush of joy, like an extra lung full of happiness instead of breath inside her chest.

There was a feeling she’d sometimes had, out of doors, when she got to the top of the Malvern Hills and there were skylarks dipping above her head, or a lonely kestrel wheeling below. It was an apprehension that she was no different from the cropped grass and the rock beneath it, and the birds, and even their shadows flitting across the hillside. This feeling came sometimes at the river-bathing place across the orchard from her father’s house, when dragonflies touched the surface of the water beside her, their veined, transparent wings catching the colours of light, like soap bubbles. Sometimes the cows would pause to look down from the opposite bank, munching, and she would all of a sudden feel as though she had become invisible, had simply evaporated into the silky greenish water and the cows’ hot breath and the summer air. She could not predict when the feeling would come, but when it did it made her slightly giddy, this sense that she was just another living speck on the surface of the earth. Less than herself, and yet more. This sensation generally happened when she was on her own, yet what it brought was an overwhelming sense that she was not alone after all. When the whole choir was singing well it could feel the same.

Singing was the main reason Ruth decided to stay on at school after her School Certificates. If she stayed on for Higher School Cert., her teacher had told her, she might be able to get into a music school. She knew she wasn’t good enough to become a soloist, either at the piano or the voice, and anyway her ambition did not extend so far. But she also knew she would have to earn her own living somehow. Perhaps she could teach music and continue to sing in a choir for pleasure. She did not know what she might do otherwise. Her father had offered to find someone – another solicitor, or the friend who owned the local auction house – to take her on as an office clerk, but she wanted to get to London if she could.

There were advantages to being in the upper school: she did not have to share a dormitory any more but had a room all to herself. She enjoyed certain privileges, such as being allowed to walk into the town when lessons finished in the afternoons; and, the greatest luxury, having two baths a week, instead of the one permitted to the younger girls. The room next to hers was occupied by an older girl called Verity Longden, who would be leaving in the summer. She was tall, with skin so pale as to be almost transparent, almost as if it might tear. Her eyelashes were very straight and fair, and thick, like the bristles on a toothbrush, and she had big, bony hands that always looked chapped. Ruth could not tell whether Verity was very plain or rather beautiful, but trying to decide one way or the other made her stare at her whenever she had the chance. Verity was a Roman Catholic, one of only a handful at the school. The Catholics walked to Mass every Sunday and when they came back to school afterwards they remained slightly set apart, at least until the lunch bell sounded, as if they were holier or more important than the rest. Verity seemed especially solemn. She was generally rather a serious girl, certainly never giggly. Something about the curve of her mouth, though, suggested a sense of humour.

One Saturday afternoon, just before autumn half term, Ruth knocked on Verity’s door and asked if she’d like to come for a walk. They had barely said more than two or three sentences to each other, but they were neighbours, they might as well be cordial. And anyway, all Ruth’s friends were out on exeat, or rehearsing for the school play.

‘There’s a hotel over in Colwall where we could get a cup of tea if you want to go that far? Otherwise we could just go up to the tearooms at the well, what d’you think?’ Ruth asked her, as they began their climb. Since Verity was older – and, as it were, the guest – it seemed proper to let her decide things.

‘I think Colwall,’ she said, as if it were a matter of some gravity.

‘It’s rather a dismal place, I’m afraid, what my mother calls a brown Windsor. But I love that side of the hills. The view’s even better than our side, and you get the sun for longer.’

‘What’s brown Windsor?’ asked Verity.

‘Brown Windsor? Have you never had brown Windsor? Gosh, you’re lucky. It’s a sort of ghastly thick soup, like liquefied meat. They have it in places like station hotels. You know, the sort of dreary places where old people don’t say a word to each other the whole way through lunch, so all you can hear is scraping spoons.’

Verity did not laugh. She nodded, but said nothing. If Verity didn’t like jokes after all, Ruth thought their walk was going to seem very long.

They went on up the hill in silence. Presently Verity began to speak.

‘When I leave here I’m going to train to be a doctor,’ she announced. ‘I have a place at University College Hospital, once I’ve done my Highers. I want to be a surgeon.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Ruth. ‘Are girls even allowed to be surgeons?’ She didn’t recall ever having heard Digby speak of a woman colleague; certainly not a senior doctor. The only women he worked with, so far as she knew, were nurses.

‘Of course we are! Girls – young women – are allowed to be anything they want to be. We want to be. Nearly anything.’

‘Golly,’ said Ruth. ‘I thought you had to be a nurse, if you wanted to go into medicine. I mean, I haven’t really thought about it much.’

‘That’s the trouble with this place,’ said Verity, ‘we’re never made to think about anything at all.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Ruth. ‘Learning about Gladstone made me think about history quite a bit. And when we did Oliver Cromwell. What things must have been like, you know, in the past.’

‘But not science?’ Verity looked at her.

Ruth suddenly felt doltish. ‘Not really, no. To tell you the truth, after we dissected a frog in the Lower Fifth, I was never quite up to science again.’

Verity laughed. Ruth glanced at her, just to make sure it wasn’t a laugh of derision, before she joined in.

After they’d had tea at the hotel in Colwall, Verity suggested that, rather than walking back, they saved their legs and caught the train to Malvern through the long tunnel instead.

‘Let’s play “I went to Harrods”,’ Verity suggested, as they took their places on the seats, which prickled through their stockings.

‘I don’t know how,’ said Ruth.

‘Well, it’s a memory game. You have to remember all the things that I say I’ve bought, and I have to remember all yours. And we both have to remember our own as well. And it’s in alphabetical order. The first to forget is the loser. So, I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark.’

Ruth paused. ‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark and a bun. Will that do?’

Verity nodded, smiling. ‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark, a bun and some china plates.’

‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark, a bun, some china plates and … and some delicious dates.’

‘Are all your turns going to be food?’ teased Verity.

‘It rather looks like it.’

From that afternoon, they spent all their free time together. They went to teashops, or sat on walls in the sun, or talked in each other’s rooms. Sometimes Verity was very serious and Ruth felt rather awed by her cleverness, but at other times she was girlish, even silly. But they never ran out of things to say. Verity’s family lived at Richmond upon Thames. There were three brothers, Verity the only girl. She had told Ruth a long story about her parents’ courtship, involving letters put in envelopes addressed to other people and misunderstandings and the wrong brother, but Ruth hadn’t really followed it all. It was all meant to be fearfully romantic, but when she met Verity’s mother and father she was disappointed: they were just ordinary, middle-aged people, who both wore glasses. Verity told her what her mother had said to her once: ‘Daddy and I love you all, but we will always love each other best.’ Ruth was not sure whether this statement wasn’t rather unkind to the children or, as Verity evidently believed, rather magnificent.

Ruth had other friends, but she missed Verity during her final year at school. She spent the last Easter holidays in Richmond with her, and the two planned to rent rooms in London together, once Ruth started at the Royal College of Music in September. An old girlfriend of Ruth’s uncle Christopher had a tall, thin house in South Kensington, where she took paying guests. The girls went to see her and liked the place, even though it smelled of cats. They would take up residence in the autumn. One of Verity’s brothers was in his final year at Cambridge, and the eldest had joined the Foreign Office and been posted abroad, but the middle brother, Harry, was living in London. He was working in some sort of insurance firm in the City.

Harry laughed easily and had the same fair, oddly blunt eyelashes as his sister, as though they had been chopped in a straight line with miniature garden shears. Among the Longdens he was teased for being the least clever and for the fact that he blushed easily. It was true that he wasn’t in the slightest formidable, as the rest of them were. He had ugly hands with stubby fingers, the knuckles whorled like knots of cross-graining in a piece of timber. It was his hands – or rather, the way she felt such peculiar tenderness towards his hands, a mixture of affection and pity – that made Ruth realise she liked Harry in a way that she had never liked anyone else before. His hands unsettled her. Whenever she was with him she glanced at them constantly. Harry had joined his sister and Ruth at a concert at the Wigmore Hall one evening and, sitting beside him in the dark, Ruth had spent the whole evening looking at his hands, folded loosely around the concert programme in his lap. By the time the music stopped she felt quite cross with him. The phrase: ‘He can’t keep his hands to himself ’ came into her mind. Such a condition seemed very desirable to her.

Once Ruth was established in London that autumn, Iris came down to visit, leaving Jamie with his doting great-aunt Hilary.

She was staying with her old friend Jocelyn for a few days. Ruth was to meet her for lunch at a little Italian place, by the corner of the underground at South Kensington.

‘You don’t mind if someone joins us, do you, darling? An old friend, I mean?’ said Iris.

Ruth felt the familiar tweak of disappointment which so often occurred within minutes of seeing her mother. They hadn’t met for months and she had been looking forward to their being alone together, without the distractions of little Jamie, or even the oddly menacing presence of Birdle. And she had never cared for Jocelyn. But it was a man who came into the restaurant and, smiling, approached their table. He bent to kiss Iris before holding out his hand to Ruth.

‘You remember Bunny, darling? He was a friend of Daddy’s, from Cambridge days.’

Ruth pretended she did.

The lunch wasn’t much fun. Bunny kept ordering bottles of raisiny red wine and talking about horses, and people who lived in Newmarket, while Iris smoked continually and laughed sharply, even though nothing was particularly funny. By the time they were having their coffee, Bunny was openly flirting with Ruth, offering to take her to the opera one night, to a box. He kept insisting that he would see her home in a taxi, although it was broad daylight and her digs were only a few streets away. Iris’s laughter had died away by the time the waiter had removed the plates from their main courses.

‘Actually I’ve got a class up at the College and I’d prefer to walk,’ Ruth lied. ‘Thanks though,’ she told him, once they were all out on the street.

‘Heavens, that man has become a bore,’ said Iris crossly, when Bunny had gone. ‘He used to be so original. Drink of course. Fatal.’

Iris had a plan for the afternoon: they would walk across the park and up Piccadilly to Bond Street. Jocelyn had told her that Fenwick’s had the smartest clothes, and she was determined to buy Ruth a coat for the winter. Iris was generous in fits. The October sunlight shone thinly through the plane trees, whose trunks bore a dappled tracery, as if they were half shadowed, half bleached with light. Iris walked fast, as always. In the store, a tired-looking assistant wearing thick, too-pale face powder brought out coats for Ruth to try on: one a dark chocolate-brown gabardine, belted; the next a pale-green swing coat with raglan sleeves which puffed at the wrists; then one in red bouclé, with big black buttons.

‘Oh, I think the green, don’t you?’ Iris asked the assistant.

‘The cut is very much of the season,’ the woman said.

‘It moves prettily at the back,’ said Iris.

Ruth surveyed herself in the glass and was not happy with what she saw: a young woman with dark hair that wouldn’t lie flat and bright eyes. Her calves were lean enough, but somehow lacked the curve necessary to make them look like the limbs of a real woman. They were a child’s legs, straight down, stumpy. The green coat accentuated the flaws of her figure and concealed its attractions: her trim waist and firm bosom were utterly lost within its folds. The colour reminded her of the drabness of hospital corridors. She thought it made her look like a huge broad bean. She wished the assistant would stop hovering so she could say so.

‘I’m not sure, actually,’ she said.

But Iris was.

‘That colour’s terribly fetching on you, darling,’ she said firmly.

‘But I don’t think I’m tall enough. I think I’d be better with a belt,’ said Ruth.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Belted coats are for Norland Nannies. Swing coats are all the thing, for the young, I mean. Aren’t they?’ she asked the assistant, who murmured in assent. Iris was already reaching into her bag for her chequebook. Before Ruth could voice any further objections the coat was being whisked towards the counter and wrapped in tissue paper, like egg whites being folded into cakes. She was handed an important-looking paper bag, with the box containing the coat inside. The bag was grass green, with black lettering swooping across its sides, and thick string handles. Iris looked expectantly at her, for thanks.

Ruth was not going to let her mother see the tears which stung her eyes, so she bent as if to tighten the lace of her left shoe. She suddenly felt much younger than her years, forlorn and childish and mutinously ungrateful.

‘Well, I want to go down to Simpson’s and buy some tea,’ Iris announced briskly. ‘I’m going to be frightfully extravagant and get all sorts of exotic things one can’t find in the country, like Lapsang Souchong.’

‘It’s lovely being able to have as many cups as one likes now,’ Ruth said. Tea had only just come off the ration. ‘Last week it went to our heads rather. Verity and I drank so much tea that we felt quite sick.’

‘Darling! Really! You do say the queerest things.’

They had reached Piccadilly and Ruth could feel her mother invisibly tugging away from her, like when you tried to push one magnet against another. ‘Thank you for the lunch. And the coat. It’s really very kind of you.’

‘Well, we can’t have you freezing to death,’ said Iris.

Ruth was able to muster a thin smile.

Chapter 4

It was all most awkward. Iris and Digby had barely even been in the same room as Edward and Helen, let alone for a whole afternoon. They had certainly never sat down to eat at the same table before. Iris would no doubt talk too much, Digby too little. Edward’s manners would prevail of course, but Helen prattled so. And all the Longden relations were Catholic and obviously disapproved. Ruth herself had received Instruction, so that it could be a Catholic service, to please Harry’s parents. She had had to undertake to bring up her children within the Faith, in due course. It was rather wonderful, to think of all those saints constantly interceding on her behalf and to learn that Mary never, ever refused a prayer. She kept quiet about the aspects of her new religion in which she could not quite believe. The only difficulty occurred when Verity suggested she make no mention as to how she was related to Jamie, who was to be her page.

‘But why?’ asked Ruth. ‘Aren’t you allowed pages who are your half-brothers?’

‘It’s only that Father Leonard might find it difficult about him being your mother’s child from her second marriage.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you know we don’t go in for divorce. It may be – and I’m not sure, it may be that I’m erring on the side of caution – that the Church would not recognise your mother’s second marriage. In which case, Jamie—’

‘You can’t mean it! That’s absurd!’

‘Father Leonard doesn’t need to know that he’s your half-brother. You can simply give his name. After all, it’s different from yours.’

‘But isn’t that terribly hypocritical? And what about “Suffer little children to come unto me”? It’s not very Christian, is it, to declare Jamie a … well, illegitimate? It’s not his fault, after all.’ Ruth had flushed with anger. ‘He’s innocent. He’s a child.’ It was the first time she had ever been short with Verity.

‘Nobody said anything like that, Ruth. It’s a question of whether or not he was born in sin. And after all, we all are. That’s why we are baptised, as you will no doubt have learned. I could very well be wrong about this question. It could very well be that there is no reason why he shouldn’t participate in the wedding Mass. But Father Leonard’s rather a stickler. I just wouldn’t want there to be any unpleasantness.’

But it was too late. The question over Jamie lodged in Ruth’s upper chest painfully, like hiccups that have gone on too long. At first she was determined to bring it up with Harry, but she thought better of it. If he did not disagree with his sister, Ruth knew she would struggle to forgive him.

Ruth had other worries. She feared embarrassment: Iris was practically a pagan, went about with bare legs, seldom did her hair. ‘You will wear a hat, won’t you, Mummy? Only, all the Longdens are,’ Ruth dared at last to ask her on the telephone.

‘Of course I will! What do you take me for?’ said Iris hotly.

‘Of course. I didn’t … it’s only that—’

‘Just because one isn’t absolutely hidebound with formality doesn’t mean that one doesn’t know how to behave,’ Iris interrupted. ‘I am a doctor’s wife, you may recall. One may live in the North, but that doesn’t make one an absolute Eskimo.’

Ruth thought that Eskimos generally did wear hats, but judged it wiser to say nothing. Getting married seemed to necessitate a lot of not saying things.

At least Iris was not intending to come south in advance of the wedding. And the thought that the reception might take place at her house seemed never to have crossed her mind: there were advantages in her failure to observe convention. It was tacitly accepted that Ruth would marry from Edward’s house. After the service at the Catholic church in Cheltenham (Father Leonard would officiate, by special arrangement with the diocese) they would repair there. There would be champagne in the dining room and then the guests would go into a marquee in the garden for the wedding breakfast.

Ruth could hardly wait for the day to be over. She and Harry so seldom had time on their own; that was the only snag of his being Verity’s brother. Harry had been sharing a flat in Bayswater with two friends, one who worked at the Treasury and one who, like Harry, was in the City. Ruth’s room in South Kensington was too small to sit about in; anyway, Verity always seemed to be at home when her brother called. Their courtship had been conducted in crowded coffee shops, concert halls and museums. It would be the greatest luxury to spend ten whole days together, just them.

Parts of the wedding day passed slowly and Ruth felt oddly disconnected at those times, as if she were a ghost, watching.

She saw smiling faces turn towards her as she processed up the aisle, a blur of goodwill like a ripple propelling her towards the altar. After the service she and Harry stood in the dining room to greet the guests; several of the women told Ruth she was radiant, which she knew was their way of saying she looked happy, if not ravishingly pretty. She hardly minded. Harry’s face became pink from the exertion of shaking every guest’s hand, his hair somehow tousled. To his bride he looked like an adorable little boy, come downstairs after being put to bed with a slight fever.

Every time she thought about anything, it seemed to have a bed in it. In her suitcase was a small round tin, housing a dome of thick dark rubber the colour of a flypaper. Absurdly, this would prevent her from having babies, at least for the time being – she had a final year at the Royal College to see out. Her father had suggested she quit now that she was to be a wife, with wifely things to do, but Harry saw no reason why she should not carry on and Ruth wanted to. The gynaecologist in Portland Place had instructed her to practise inserting and removing the device before the honeymoon. She must first lie down. Get the thing in. Then after use – a prescribed amount of hours later – she was to remove the thing, wash it in tepid water; never hot, for very hot water could cause the rubber to perish. At last she must dry it carefully before sprinkling the barest coating of talcum powder over the dome, like dusting icing sugar onto a fairy cake.

In her room she had blushed, alone, as she removed it from its tin. The bed felt too high, too exposed, so she lay on the narrow rug beside it. First she tried lying on her back, then on her side. The base of the dome was a sprung ring; the trick was to narrow it between two fingers, while probing with the other hand. Once in place you could let go, and the ring would resume its circular form, fitting over what the doctor had told her was called the cervix, like a tiny brimless hat. There was a knack to it apparently. Evidently it was a knack she did not possess. The device kept springing out of her hand and across the rug. On one attempt it jumped several feet, as far as the door. Ruth began to laugh. But laughing alone was ridiculous and made it harder to concentrate, which made it more difficult to get the wretched thing into place, which only made her laugh more, with the helplessness of it all. It was quite impossible. It would never fit. It would leap out at Harry, on her wedding night, startling as a frog, and she would be too ashamed ever to face him again.

For several days she made no further attempts. The tin sat undisturbed, a shameful secret in the drawer among her under-garments. Then, intrepid after a day of studying, she strode home and went straight up to her room, unlaced her shoes, unfastened her suspender belt and pulled down her woollen stockings and knickers and tried again, in broad daylight; not lying down as the doctor had told her, but standing up in her bare feet, one foot raised on the chair at the end of her bed. This was the way a Valkyrie would put in her Dutch cap, she thought, and it brought victory. Getting it out – which had worried her: what if it got stuck? – turned out to be much easier than putting it in. There was a way of hooking your finger under its rim, and yanking. It was rather like gutting a fish.

None of this augured well for the honeymoon. There was nothing pleasurable in the probing necessitated by the contraceptive device. How could actual lovemaking be any different? Ruth didn’t mean to keep thinking about how it would turn out in that department, but somehow her thoughts always came back to settle on it, like a bee returning again and again to the same plant. She liked kissing – she and Harry had done plenty of that – but she did feel anxious about the next bit.

Their room at the hotel by Lake Garda had long wooden shutters and a paper of big orange-ish flowers. The candlewick bed cover was an anaemic tangerine: not the bright colour of a tangerine’s skin, but the colour of the tight, pithy inside of an under-ripe fruit. At first Ruth disliked the room’s decor – it embarrassed her somehow – and she gravitated towards the window, which framed a view of blue water, distant villas and air. But by the second morning she loved it all: the ugly tufted bedspread, the coyness of the spindly chairs, even the stiff bath taps. No wonder people spoke of married bliss! It turned out that what happened in bed was perfectly lovely. You could kiss all the way through, which had surprised her: she had imagined that kissing was only a preliminary, a first course. Nor did you have to keep your eyes shut. You could look, you could kiss, you could kiss any part of each other, you could take as long as you liked. It seemed there was nothing you couldn’t do, there were no forbidden zones, and all of it was just the best feeling ever.

Their time in bed made her love Harry more than ever, in a slightly dotty way, at once hypnotised and ravenous. It also had the strange effect of making her fall rather in love with herself. Ruth’s body was not something she had ever thought much about. She carried it around, dressed it, fed it when it was hungry. When she looked in the glass before going out for an evening she occasionally tutted at her unshapely legs, her disobliging hair. Now she found herself amazed at her own flesh while she bathed, at her heavy breasts and the freckles on her forearms. She suddenly felt for the first time that she was beautiful.

Back in London they took a first- and second-floor maisonette in Pimlico, in Alderney Street. On the lower floor was a drawing room, with a pair of graceful windows to the floor. The boudoir grand piano which had been Harry’s wedding gift to her was here. There was a dining room and, at the back, a kitchen with a tiny larder off it. Upstairs was their bedroom, a dressing room for Harry and – the thing that Ruth loved best about their new home – a bathroom much bigger than any other she knew of in London. As if to do justice to their ample surrounds, the basin and bath were enormous. Ruth installed a chaise longue under the bathroom window, so that she and Harry could keep each other company while one of them was soaking.

She rode her bicycle up to the Royal College every morning, while Harry took the underground to work. A char came in three times a week, to launder Harry’s work shirts and do the heavy cleaning, such as it was. Ruth arrived home well before her husband in the afternoons, in plenty of time to start preparing their dinner. Usually she practised the piano for an hour, or sang. She taught herself to cook out of a book: steak Diane, chicken à la King. Often they went to bed as soon as Harry got home, almost before he had had time to take off his coat. Afterwards they sat flushed and naked in bed, and drank sherry out of the prim cut-glass glasses they had been given as a wedding present. Sometimes they did not get up again, but one of them went down to the kitchen in a dressing gown to fetch cheese and water biscuits, which infested the sheets with huge prickly crumbs.

It was after their first Christmas as a married couple that Harry began to make noises about babies. Ruth secretly blamed his family, who – perhaps reminded of infants by the festivities attendant on the baby Jesus – kept dropping heavy hints. Even Verity, who showed no inclination of her own to reproduce, was a culprit. Ruth found this treacherous of her old friend, who had always made so much of women’s careers. Harry was so genial, so dear: they never quarrelled. She never denied him anything, because he asked for so little, only her affection and interest, which came naturally. Sometimes it was rather a slog, getting up early to catch the train to Richmond every Sunday for Mass with the Longdens, followed by lunch back at their house, but it was only natural that they should see more of his family than of hers, because they lived so much nearer. And they were a proper family, she reminded herself, not like hers.

She adored Harry, she wanted to please him, but she did want, too, to finish her studies before having a baby; or at least, that was the official reason.

‘They don’t come overnight, you know,’ said Harry. ‘We could start now and you’d still be fine for your exams in June. I mean, it wouldn’t arrive ’til ages afterwards.’

‘I can’t appear at the College bulging! It would be too … I don’t know. Too odd. Conspicuous. I’d just feel funny, being the only one. I’m the only one who’s married as it is. Everyone else goes back to boiled dinners in digs. I’m the only one with a home of my own, who cooks.’ She frowned.

‘I know, darling. Don’t panic. No need to look so cross.’

‘I’m not cross. I don’t feel cross. I only feel torn, you see, because I don’t want to disappoint you.’

‘Speckle, you never disappoint me.’

‘So can we have a baby later, after the summer?’

It never occurred to her that she might experience any difficulty in the getting of a baby: she assumed that all she would have to do was not use the contraceptive device. As it turned out she was right. At Easter they went to stay with Iris for a few days. Birdle, who generally reserved his worst bites for men, had taken a shine to Harry on sight. As soon as Harry came into the room, he shrieked in recognition, although he had not seen him for several months.

‘Stop that racket at once, Birdle,’ Iris snapped. She was not altogether pleased when Birdle liked anyone besides herself. But he continued whistling and squawking. Only when Harry went and stroked the feathers at the back of the bird’s head did he fall quiet. He drooped with pleasure, bowing his head with the uncharacteristic meekness of a spaniel.

They planned to spend a night in the Lake District on their way back to London. The inn was a low building of whitewashed stone, with polished slate floors. But their room was in a flimsily built wing at the back, with narrow twin beds and thin walls. It had a mildewy smell, not altogether unpleasant, like a hymn book. They spent the afternoon walking before coming back to the place for supper. Installed in their room, they could hear a woman’s voice from the next room. The words were muffled but the tone was clear – she was recounting a tale of grievance, which caused her voice to grow shriller every few moments – and every now and again a second voice, a man’s, responded with a single gruff syllable. The thought that these neighbours would be able to hear them as vividly on the other side of the wall struck them as both comic and aphrodisiac. They kissed, suppressing laughter, before landing on one of the beds, clothes half on. They felt as pleased and as naughty as children enjoying a midnight feast. In the scrummage there was no time for Ruth to pad down the landing to the bathroom, with its damp-ruckled linoleum, to install the device.

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