She ducked out when a third, a rather shy boy, a captain called Tristan, offered to tie a piece of string around her finger. (“Sorry, it’s all I’ve got. There’ll be a gorgeous diamond for you when this is all over. No? Are you sure? You’d be doing a chap an awfully big favour.”) She had bad luck and would spare him it, Izzie thought—uncharacteristically selfless—which was ridiculous of her given that all those lovely subalterns were pretty much doomed with or without her assistance.
Izzie never saw Tristan again after her refusal and presumed him dead (she presumed them all dead), but a year after the war ended she was riffling through the society pages when she came across a photo of him emerging from St. Mary Undercroft. He was a member of parliament now and, it turned out, filthy rich with family money. He was beaming at the ridiculously young bride on his arm, a bride who was wearing on her finger, if one looked with a magnifying glass, a diamond that did indeed look gorgeous. Izzie had saved him, she supposed, but, sadly, she had not saved herself. She was twenty-four years old when the Great War ended and realized that she’d used up all her chances.
The first of her fiancés had been called Richard. She had known very little about him beyond that. Rode with the Beaufort Hunt, she seemed to recall. She had said “yes” to him on a whim, but she had been madly in love with the second of her betrotheds, the one whose death she had been a witness to in the field hospital. She had cared for him and, even better, he had cared for her. They had spent their brief moments together imagining a charming future—boating, riding, dancing. Food, laughter, sunshine. Champagne to toast their good fortune. No mud, no endless awful slaughter. He was called Augustus. Gussie, his friends called him. A few years later she discovered that fiction could be both a means of resurrection and of preservation. “When all else has gone, art remains,” she said to Sylvie during the next war. “The Adventures of Augustus is art?” Sylvie said, raising an elitist eyebrow. No capital letter for Augustus. Izzie’s definition of art was broader than Sylvie’s definition, of course. “Art is anything created by one person and enjoyed by another.”
“Even Augustus?” Sylvie said and laughed.
“Even Augustus,” Izzie said.
Those poor dead boys in the Great War were not so very much older than Teddy. There had been a moment with her nephew today when she had been almost overcome by the tenderness of her feelings for him. If only she could protect him from harm, from the pain that the world would (inevitably) bring him. Of course, she had a child of her own, born when she was sixteen and hastily adopted, an excision so clean and so swift that she never thought about the boy. It was perhaps just as well, then, that at the moment when she felt moved to reach out to stroke Teddy’s hair he had suddenly bobbed down and said, “Oh, look, a slow worm,” and Izzie was left touching empty air. “What a funny little boy you are,” she said and for a moment saw the shattered face of Gussie as he lay dying on his camp bed. And then the faces of all of those poor dead boys, rank upon rank, stretching away further and further into the distance. The dead.
She accelerated away from this memory as fast as she could, swerving just in time to miss a cyclist, sending him wobbling into the verge from where he yelled insults at the retreating back bumper of the heedless Sunbeam. Arduis invictus, that had been the FANY’s motto. Unconquered in hardship. Terrifically boring. Izzie had had quite enough of hardship, thank you.
The car flew along the roads. The germ of Augustus in Izzie’s mind already sprouted.
Maurice, absent from this roll-call, was currently trussing himself up in white tie and tails in preparation for a Bullingdon Club dinner in Oxford. Before the evening was out, the restaurant, as Bullingdon Club tradition demanded, would be wrecked. Inside this starched carapace it would have surprised people to know there was a soft writhing creature full of doubt and hurt. Maurice was determined that this creature would never see the light of day and that in the not-too-distant future he would become fused with the carapace itself, a snail who could never escape his shell.
An “assignation.” The very word sounded sinful. He had booked two rooms in the Savoy. They had met there before he had gone away, but innocently (relatively) in public spaces.
“Adjoining rooms,” he said. The hotel staff would know the purpose of the word “adjoining,” surely? How shaming. Sylvie’s heart was thundering in her chest as she took a cab from the station to the hotel. She was a woman about to fall.