Sylvie could have swooned from the amount of perfume that she was wearing, spilt by a jittery hand, although she was not usually given to nerves. She was going up to London for the evening. It would be hot and stuffy on the train, even worse in town, she would have to sacrifice her fur. As the foxes had been sacrificed for her. There was a joke—of sorts—lodged in there somewhere, the kind that Teddy might make, not Sylvie. Sylvie had no sense of humour. It was a blight on her character.
Her eye was caught unwillingly by the photograph on her dressing-table, a studio portrait taken after the birth of Jimmy. Sylvie was seated. The new baby in his christening gown—a vast affair, worn by every Todd—seemed to overflow from her arms while the rest of her brood were arranged artfully around her in a semblance of adoration. Sylvie ran a finger over the silver frame, intending fondness but finding dust. She must have a word with Bridget. The girl had grown sluttish. (“All servants turn on their masters eventually,” her mother-in-law had advised when Sylvie was first married to Hugh.)
A commotion downstairs could only indicate the return of Izzie. Reluctantly, Sylvie removed her fur and put on her light evening duster for which only hard-working silkworms had been sacrificed. She placed her hat on her head. Her unfashionable hair didn’t suit the neat skull caps and berets of the day and she was still wearing a chapeau. She accidentally jabbed herself with her long silver hat pin. (Could you kill someone with a hat pin? Or merely injure them?) She muttered an imprecation to the gods that caused the scrubbed innocent faces of her children to look reproachfully at her from the photograph. As well they might, she thought. She would soon be forty years old and the prospect had made her dissatisfied with herself. (“More dissatisfied,” Hugh offered.) She could feel impatience at her back and recklessness before her.
She gave herself one last appraisal. Good enough, she supposed, which was not necessarily a judgement that she liked to settle for. It was two years since she had seen him. Would he still think her a beauty? That was what he had called her. Was there a woman on earth who could resist being called a beauty? But Sylvie had resisted and had remained chaste. “I am a married woman,” she had repeated primly. “Then you shouldn’t be indulging in this game, my dear,” he said. “The consequences might be awful for you—for us.” He laughed at this idea as if it were appealing. It was true, she had led him on and then found there was nowhere to go.
He had gone abroad, to the colonies, doing important work for the Empire, but now he was back and Sylvie’s life was running through her hands like water and she no longer felt inclined to be prim.
She was greeted by an enormous bunch of bluebells. “Oh, bluebells, how lovely,” she said to Teddy. Her boy. She had two others but sometimes they hardly seemed to count. Her daughters weren’t necessarily objects of affection, more like problems to be solved. Only one child held her heart in his rather grubby fist. “Do wash before tea, dear,” she said to Teddy. “What on earth have you been doing all this time?”
“Getting to know each other,” Izzie said. “Such a darling boy. I say, aren’t you looking glamorous, Sylvie. And I could smell you from a hundred yards away. Quite the femme séduisante. Do you have plans? Do tell.”
Sylvie glared at her but was diverted from a response when she saw the mucky green alligators on the Voysey hall runner. “Out,” she said, shooing Izzie towards the front door, and again, “Out.”
“Damned spot,” Hugh murmured, wandering into the hall from the growlery as Izzie flounced down the path. He turned to Sylvie and said, “You look lovely, darling.”
They listened to the engine of Izzie’s Sunbeam kicking into life and the unnerving sound of her accelerating away. She drove in the manner of Toad, much tooting and little braking. “She’ll kill someone sooner or later,” Hugh, a stately driver, said. “And I thought she was penniless. What did she do to get the wherewithal for another car?”
“Nothing decent, of that you can be sure,” Sylvie said.
Teddy was free at last of Izzie’s awful ramblings, but still had to suffer the usual interrogation from his mother before she was satisfied that one of her children hadn’t been corrupted in some way by contact with Izzie. “She’s never without motive,” she said darkly. He was eventually freed to search out his tea, a somewhat put-up affair of sardines on toast as it was Mrs. Glover’s evening off.
“She’s eaten a lark,” Teddy said to his sisters over the tea table. “In Italy. Not that it makes a difference where.”
“ ‘A skylark wounded in the wing,’ ” Ursula said, and when Teddy looked at her blankly she said, “Blake. ‘A skylark wounded in the wing, a cherubim does cease to sing.’ ”