“Well, something abstrusely mathematical, no doubt,” Ursula said, determinedly vague herself. Her man from the Admiralty was inclined to pillow talk. “I expect it’s easier for her if you don’t ask anything.”
“German codes, I’ll bet,” Teddy said.
“Well, don’t say that to anyone,” Ursula said, thereby confirming his suspicions.
After lunch, Teddy suggested to Ursula that they have a whisky in the growlery. It seemed a good way of marking their father’s passing, something he didn’t feel he had done.
“The growlery?” Ursula said. “I’m afraid the growlery is no more.”
Sylvie, he discovered when he put his head round the door of the little back room, had transformed Hugh’s snug into what she referred to as a “sewing room.” “Lovely and light and airy now,” she said. “It was so gloomy before.” The walls had been painted a pale green, the floor covered by an Aubusson-type carpet, and the heavy velvet curtains had been done away with in favour of some kind of pale open-weave linen. A dainty Victorian sewing-table, previously neglected and relegated to Bridget’s spartan room, now sat conveniently next to a button-back chaise longue that Sylvie had “picked up for a song in a little shop in Beaconsfield.”
“Does she sew in here?” Teddy asked Ursula, picking out a cotton reel from the sewing-basket and contemplating it.
“What do you think?”
They went for a stroll around the garden instead, much of it now given over to vegetables as well as the large chicken coops. Sylvie’s birds were kept under strict lock and key as there was always a fox on the prowl somewhere. The grand old beech tree still stood imperturbably in the middle of the lawn but the rest of the garden, apart from Sylvie’s roses, was beginning to suffer neglect. “I can’t get a decent gardener for love nor money,” Sylvie said crossly. “Oh, war is terribly inconvenient,” Izzie said sarcastically, smirking at Teddy, who didn’t respond as it felt wrong to conspire with her against his mother, even when his mother was at her most annoying.
“I lost my last one to the Home Guard,” Sylvie said, ignoring Izzie. “God help us if old Mr. Mortimer is all that stands between us and the invading hordes.”
“She’s getting a pig,” Ursula said to Teddy as they regarded the incarcerated chickens, purring and crooning with broodiness.
“Who?”
“Mother.”
“A pig?” He couldn’t imagine Sylvie as a pig keeper somehow.
“I know, she’s full of surprises,” Ursula said. “Who knew she had the soul of a black-market racketeer? She’ll be hawking bacon and sausages round back doors. We should applaud her enterprise, I suppose.”
At the bottom of the garden they came across a large clump of dog-daisies—ox-eyes that must have emigrated there from the meadow. “Another invading horde,” Ursula said. “I think I shall take some back to London with me.” She surprised Teddy by producing a large penknife from her coat pocket and began to cut several of the spindly stems. “You would be amazed at what I carry with me,” she laughed. “Be prepared. It’s the Girl Guides’ motto as well as the Scouts’, you know—‘You have to be prepared at any moment to face difficulties and even dangers by knowing what to do and how to do it.’ ”
“It’s different in the Scouts,” Teddy said. “Longer, more detailed in its demands.” More was expected of men, he supposed, although all the women of his acquaintance would have disagreed with that thought.
Ursula always forgot that he had never graduated from Cubs to Scouts. She, of course, had never had to suffer the indignities of the Kibbo Kift.
He elected to go back to London with Ursula, even though he knew it would disappoint his mother, who had hoped to hang on to him for another day. There was a hollow heart to Fox Corner without his father that was dispiriting.
“If we leave now we can catch the next train,” Ursula said, harrying him out of the door, “not that it will bear any relationship to the timetable.”
“We’ve got bags of time actually,” she said when they had said their farewells and had stepped into the lane, “I just wanted to get away. Mother’s difficult to take at the best of times, Izzie’s worse, so the two of them together are insufferable.”
Are you going to stay at my flat?” Ursula asked when the train pulled in to Marylebone and he said, no, he was going to look up an old pal, “Have a night on the town.” He wasn’t sure why he lied, or indeed why he didn’t want to stay with his sister. A nagging need to be unfettered perhaps for one last time.
When they were in the midst of their goodbyes, Ursula suddenly said, “Oh, I nearly forgot,” and after searching through the contents of her handbag she retrieved a small object, silver but dirty with age.