His house was a pretty little Victorian cottage, just off the King’s Road, with two bedrooms and a tiny back garden. He moved in with no furniture, apart from a rather fine bed from Heal’s which had been his mother’s. His father was delighted to see the back of it. It was rather large for the room, but he had always loved the bed, used to lie on it with his mother when he was a small boy, while she read him stories and sang nursery rhymes to him. After she ran away with the artist, his father had threatened to burn it for firewood, but it had remained in the big house in Knightsbridge, a source of happy memories for Ned throughout his childhood. When he came home from prep school for the holidays, wretched, hardly able to believe now the unimaginably happy time when his mother had lived in the house, he would creep in and lie on the bed, summoning her back by sheer force of memory – her perfume, her smile, her lilting voice.
He was forbidden to go in there by his father; but one night, creeping from his room along the corridor to hers, gently pushing open the door, he saw his father standing with his back to him, looking down at the bed. It was the first time he realised that his mother’s departure from their lives had hurt his father as much as it had hurt him.
He had seen very little of his mother over the years; just the occasional letter or even surprise visit to school, always with a time limit, a train to catch, someone to meet, perhaps once or twice a year; usually Christmas presents, always birthday presents, but by post. That she did not try to see him more hurt him horribly. It wasn’t until he was much older that he had understood that she was kept from him by law until his eighteenth birthday, when she had returned to his life, sought him out at his rooms at Oxford, bearing ridiculously extravagant gifts, all brought from Paris – a long silk scarf from Hermès, an exquisite leather attaché case from Galeries Lafayette, and an amazing panama hat with a wide floppy brim which she had found in the flea market one Sunday morning and having found it, she said, could only visualise Ned’s face beneath it.
‘Now come along,’ she said. ‘Time we became friends again, you and I.’
And half unwillingly, half intrigued, he had let her take him to lunch at the Randolph, very aware of the interest she caused, so chic and so beautiful still, with her cloud of dark hair and great brown eyes, so like his.
It took a while, but eventually she began to make inroads on his hostility and his hurt, explaining that Sir James had put upon her all manner of legal restraints, and threatened her and her lover with physical violence should she even try to see Ned. Many years later, she told him, her artist lover, insanely jealous of the beautiful little boy she wept over nightly and begged to be allowed to see, had threatened to leave her.
‘And are you happy, my darling?’ she said. ‘Are you in love, is there some beautiful girl I should know about?’
He said there was not, but that he was very happy. She stared at him intently for a moment or two, then said, ‘Or some other sort of beauty, perhaps? You can tell me. Of all people I will understand.’
He had blushed furiously, said he didn’t know what she meant. ‘Darling, of course you do.’
‘Mother—’
‘It’s all right. I won’t breathe a word, of course.’
‘Well, you won’t,’ he said, suddenly angry at this entirely unwarranted invasion into his most private life. ‘Because there is nothing to breathe a word about. Please, can we stop this at once? Or I shall have to leave and that would be a pity.’
‘It would. But if ever you do need to talk to me about anything, anything at all, then please remember my view of life is not quite the same as most of the people you are surrounded by. All right? Oh, you look so handsome in that scarf,’ she added, winding it round his neck. ‘Now, tell me, what sort of a doctor do you want to be? A surgeon, like your father?’
And he had explained that he might want to be a paediatrician. ‘That’s a doctor who looks after children.’ And she had said how wonderful, and then, said that she and the artist – ‘Michel as he is known in Paris, although of course he is as English as you or I, and really it’s Michael’ – were thinking of coming back ‘quite soon’ to England to live.
‘This awful war business, so worrying, it’s spoiling everything for everybody. Anyway, we’re not prepared to risk our lives, and we think we’ll go and live in Cornwall; there are lots of artists and artists’ colonies there, and Michael will be very happy. He’s too old to be called up, of course.’
‘And will you be very happy?’ Ned asked and she looked at him and said probably not, but she had little choice really. ‘I can hardly leave him, I don’t have any money. Anyway, we rub along together very well . . .’
That had been the last he had seen of her for many years. Impatient and even bitter at the new desertion, for he had hoped to see more of her after the birthday conversation as he thought of it (although it had contained subject matter that had frightened him considerably). Then one evening, there was a ring at his new Chelsea doorbell and there she stood – a little older, a little grey in her wild dark hair, her clothes neither fashionable nor unfashionable, but the usual riot of flowing layered multicoloured fabrics, her arms outstretched, and impossible to turn away. She had got the address, she explained, from the housekeeper at his father’s home. ‘Dear Mrs Ellis, she was always very fond of me . . .’
He asked her in, stiffly at first, but it didn’t last – it couldn’t against her enthusiasm, her exclamations of delight at the pretty house. ‘And my bed! Oh, how lovely to see it again, Ned, and to know that you liked it so much. I would never allow your father into it,’ she added, absent-mindedly pulling the counterpane straight. ‘It was mine, my refuge, my queendom.’
It was his turn – after more than a dozen years as he pointed out – to take her to dinner; they went nowhere smart or famous but to one of the small restaurants on the King’s Road that were becoming fashionable, and she told him that Michael had died. ‘Quite suddenly, of a heart attack.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and she smiled her conspiratorial, enchanting smile and said, ‘I don’t think I am. He was just as much a bully in his way as your father. I only went off with him because he was an escape, and I only stayed with him because I had no alternative. He’s left me quite a lot of money – they sold well, those chocolate-boxy pictures of his – so I shall be all right. I shan’t come back to London. We have a pretty house in Cornwall, near Fowey, very nice, lots of friends, and I shall stay there.’
‘Right,’ said Ned, with a rather unfilial stab of relief, for the thought of Persephone becoming a part of his daily life was alarming. ‘But what will you do?’
‘Oh, darling, I have a little business of my own – I make cushions. You have no idea how much people want cushions; in fact, they want mine so much I have had to find people to help me make them. I enjoy it very much. Now, talking of being alone, how about you? Any girlfriends? Fiancées? Wives?’
‘No.’
‘Ned, you’re in your thirties . . .’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I simply haven’t had time. I’ve done nothing but work ever since I came back from the war.’
‘Ned, darling, there is always time for love.’
‘Not for me there hasn’t been.’
‘And still nothing else, no one else?’
‘No,’ said Ned, angry suddenly. ‘Mother, please. I don’t want to have to leave you here, but—’