“Let’s hope that something eats her one day,” the more down-to-earth Pamela added cheerfully.
Pamela was going to Leeds University to study science. She was looking forward to the “bracing north,” the “real” people. “Aren’t we real enough?” Teddy grumbled to Ursula, who laughed and said, “What is real?” which seemed a silly question to Teddy, who had no occasion to question the phenomenal world. Real was what you could see and taste and touch. “You’re missing at least two senses there,” Ursula pointed out. Real was the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song.
The evening’s account for Fox Corner: after Hugh had driven Sylvie to the station he retired to his growlery again with a small glass of whisky and the stub of a half-smoked cigar. He was a man of moderate habits, more by instinct than conscious choice. It was unusual for Sylvie to go up to town. “The theatre and supper with friends,” she said. “I shall stay over.” She had a restless spirit, an unfortunate thing in a wife, but he must trust her in everything or the whole edifice of marriage would fall and crumble.
Pamela was in the morning room, her nose in a chemistry textbook. She had failed her Girton entrance exam and didn’t really want to venture into the “bracing north,” but “needs must” as Sylvie was wont—irritatingly—to say. Pamela had (quietly) hoped for glittering prizes and a brilliant career and now feared that she would not be the bold woman she had hoped to be.
Ursula, sprawled on the carpet at Pamela’s feet, was declining irregular Latin verbs. “Oh, joy,” she said to Pamela. “Life can surely only improve from here,” and Pamela laughed and said, “Don’t be so sure.”
Jimmy was sitting at the kitchen table in his pyjamas, enjoying his milk and biscuits before bedtime. Mrs. Glover, their cook, was a woman who would brook no myth or fable and so, in the absence of her oversight, Bridget was taking the opportunity to entertain Jimmy with a garbled yet still remarkably bloodcurdling tale about “the Pooka” while she scrubbed the pots. Mrs. Glover herself was at home, dozing lightly, her feet propped up on the fender, a small glass of stout to hand.
Izzie, meanwhile, was on the open road, singing “Alouette” to herself. The tune was now lodged firmly in her brain. Je te plumerai, she bellowed unmusically, je te plumerai. I will pluck you. The war had been a dreadful thing, she wished she hadn’t reminded herself of it. She had been a FANY. A rather silly acronym, in Izzie’s opinion. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. She had gone out to drive ambulances, although she had never even driven a car, but in the end she was doing all kinds of horrible things. She remembered cleaning out the ambulances at the end of the day, blood and fluids and waste. Remembered, too, the mutilations, the charred skeletons, the ruined villages, limbs poking through mud and earth. Buckets of filthy swabs and pus-soaked bandages and the terrible oozing wounds of the poor boys. No wonder people wanted to forget all about it. Have a bit of fun, for heaven’s sake. She was awarded a Croix de Guerre. Never told anyone at home about it. Put it away in a drawer when she came home. It meant nothing when you thought about what those poor boys had gone through.
She had been engaged twice during the war, both men dying within days of proposing to her and long before Izzie herself had got round to writing a letter home with her happy news. She had been with one of them, the second one, when he died. By chance she had found him in a field hospital that her ambulance was delivering the wounded to. She hadn’t recognized him at first, he had been so mangled by artillery fire. The matron, short of nurses and orderlies, encouraged her to stay with him. “There, there,” Izzie soothed, keeping watch at his deathbed by the oily yellow light of a Tilley lamp. He called out for his mother at the end, they all did. Izzie couldn’t imagine calling for Adelaide on her deathbed.
She smoothed her fiancé’s sheets, kissed his hand as there was not much face left to kiss and let an orderly know that he was dead. No euphemisms here. Then she returned to her ambulance and went foraging for more casualties.