Cover

Title Page

Copyright Notice

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Dedication

TO MY FATHER

Book One

BOOK ONE

1928

Chapter I

I

“No, not really,” Mary was saying. “No, it didn’t really help things much.”

The doors were ajar. Anne, sticking entertainment-tax stamps on to green and orange tickets, listening to her mother’s rich lazy ironical voice, frowned.

Mary was describing over the telephone, for the twentieth time, the awful scare they’d had at last week’s concert, with the Spanish Quartet. The ’cello and second violin—poor little things, they were almost in tears—had left their parts of the Dohnányi locked up in a hotel at Victoria, and when Mary had gone round there in a taxi with only a quarter of an hour to spare, while they played the Schubert, she’d had the most terrific job persuading the staff to let her into the rooms. And, of course, it had all been very funny. Very, very funny, thought Anne, frowning. Very funny indeed.

“Ah, well; ah, well. That was just one of the awkward bits.”

How Mother loves all this. And why shouldn’t she? Anne’s eyes moved round the attractive little room, with stacks of papers everywhere, the Breton armoire, the Steinlen poster on the wall, the bed, the dressing-table, the shelf of yellow paper-bound books, the gay chessboard curtains at the windows. Rather like the inside of a caravan. At night you went to bed on the camouflaged divan surrounded by the day’s débris—letters, newspapers, press cuttings, other people’s musical instruments, tennis rackets, and usually a little dirty crockery or a few beer glasses which had escaped notice in the wash-up after a picnic meal. And this is my home, Anne thought.

The truth was, she was still feeling a bit peevish at having had to move into the music-room, because of a Central School student whom Mary had invited in to sleep for the next fortnight, until she could get digs. The bed in the music-room had hot pipes running along the wall beside it. One woke up in the morning half-stewed. Why couldn’t the wretched girl have known beforehand and made her own arrangements? But nobody ever knew anything beforehand here. Always these last-moment decisions, rushings out to get food, collect people for a party. Always this atmosphere of living in a railway station—just for the sake of living in a railway station. Anne yawned. But I quite see what fun all this is for Mary.