“I have the outfit that Coco Chanel bought for me at the Galeries Lafayette,” I said, “but that’s up in Scotland. There wouldn’t be time to telephone Fig and have it sent down to London, would there?”

“Knowing your sister-in-law she’d probably flush it down the nearest loo and then claim she couldn’t find it,” Mummy said. “Let’s just hope there are a few decent-looking outfits to be found in London tomorrow. Although God knows where we will find them.” She was prowling around me, examining me as if she were a tiger sizing up her next meal. “It’s a pity you are so impossibly large,” she said, “or you could wear some of my things. Max loves me to buy new clothes and I never know what to do with the old ones. But I fear I have nothing you’d fit into.”

“You make me sound like a giant,” I said. “I’m only five foot six. You’re the one who is small.”

“Petite, darling. I’m petite. Too bad you inherited the robust physique of those Scottish ancestors. The royal side were small enough, just those wretched hearty Scots must be to blame.”

“Darcy seems to like me the way I am,” I said.

“I’ve found that men are often blinded by love,” she said. “Never mind, we’ll have you looking respectable, if not fashionable, by the time we leave.”

THE NEXT MORNING we set off right after breakfast. “Might as well try Fenwick’s first since they are just around the corner on Bond Street,” she said. But half an hour later she had declared them too impossibly frumpy. “You’ll be dining on the Berengaria with me, darling. They can’t get the impression that I let my only child run around in rags.”

“You have until now,” I wanted to say. My mother had only popped into my life on rare occasions and it had never crossed her mind that I had no money and had been surviving on baked beans on toast.

She hailed a taxicab. “Harrods might just have something,” she said.

“Selfridges is closer,” I pointed out.

She looked at me in horror. “Selfridges is where typists and lower-middle-class housewives shop,” she said, conveniently forgetting again that she had been born in the back streets of the East End.

So we went to Harrods where doormen leaped and bowed, murmuring, “Welcome back, Your Grace. It’s been too long.”

Mummy swept in, ordering a jar of her favorite face cream as she passed the cosmetics counter, a pair of red leather gloves and matching beret, suitable for a sea cruise, before she took the lift to ladies’ dresses. A formidable woman bore down on us. “And how can I assist madame?” she asked.

“You can find me an assistant young enough to have a feel for what is fashionable this season,” Mummy said. “I’m taking my daughter on a sea cruise.”