No, she said. I enjoy my children, Aubrey. I enjoy their difficulties. They’re an adventure!

She was pleased with that. It almost made her feel she was creative.

So Aubrey didn’t persist.

You mustn’t have any regrets, she said, touching with a hand. There’s always friendship. I like to look at you in that light. Yes, Aubrey, it suits us.

Though there were regrets, for Mrs Standish, the glance backward at the house in Regent’s Park, the feel of the house in Regent’s Park, for the things in Aubrey’s house were smooth to touch, they had the rich discreet texture of Aubrey’s hands. I am really very stupid, sighed Mrs Standish, and why? She tried to find some solution in the coffee stain on the hem of her dress. Spilling things, she mopped at them with her handkerchief and hoped that they would work in. They did, if not into the stuff, into Mrs Standish’s accommodating mind. Because it was easier to accept. If not the Aubrey Silks. She laughed. Oh dear, no. She liked to stretch in bed at eleven o’clock, her body distinct inside the nightgown, she liked to hold up her arms welcoming nothing but her own unseizable well-being, till the sleeves tumbled back from her arms down to the little tufts of reddish hair. The mere existing inside your own sensual envelope was good. Something more permanent than the shared sensation. So Mrs Standish sheltered behind her children. And Eden, she said, was just at the difficult age.

Dear Mother, [Eden wrote]

I mean to do something when I get home, I don’t know what – yet – but something useful. I was never any good at sitting. This place is hell, the last terms. Do you ever feel you will suffocate, just from being cooped up with so many useless women? I’ve been thinking and I’ve got to do something. Oh God, why does time go so slowly! Do you know I’ve been ticking off the days on a piece of paper? Now that it’s warm we can get outside. Sometimes I can get away on my own. If I’m careful. And damn what happens, anyway. If you go about a mile along the Charlesford Road, over the fields, you can see the sea. There are primroses now. Yesterday I went into a cottage and a woman gave me milk. She had just lost her baby from meningitis. And two others stillborn. Her husband works for one of the Nobs in the neighbourhood. Well, we had quite a talk. She showed me a postcard from her brother, who’s at sea, written from Galveston, Texas. You couldn’t keep me on here, darling, even if it wasn’t last terms. Because it’s time I began – not just sit round hearing about people’s fathers buying hunters and people’s mothers being at Cannes. Do you know the woman I talked to in the cottage went into service when she was a girl for £9 a year. And she wasn’t bitter! –