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relationships, which she invariably described as “divine,” like an elegant and expensive eel.
    She had the gift of remaining on friendly terms with all the men she had abandoned, and she spent her mornings chatting and laughing with them on the telephone. She was able to give them all the feeling that if she got so much pleasure from having fun there would be something niggardly if they did not do their best to see that she continued to have it. Although she had never had any children—“Who could face that, darling?”—all her ex-husbands and ex-lovers continued to finance her for years after she had left them, though they were under no legal obligation to do so. Having no money of her own, yet loving to entertain on a recklessly generous scale, she was continually on the verge of going “broke”; but she was always saved by the men from her past, who would rally to her rescue and send her large lump-sum donations, as though she had somehow convinced them that supporting the extravagance of the life she loved to live was like contributing to a worthwhile charity.
    When the war started Aunt Lavinia astonished her friends and family by joining the A.T.S. and rising very quickly to the rank of Captain. “Everyone thought that I was so irresponsible and dotty that I would be court-martialled immediately. But they couldn’t have been more wrong, darling ...”
    She said that having always seen herself as a leader of men she found that all she needed to do for the “duration of hostilities” was reverse her usual role and become a leader of women. “The joke was this ... In the end, I was the one who was expected to do all the court-martialling.”
    She claimed that she had adored the war—that it couldn’t have been more fun, that it was rubbish to think that khaki army uniforms had to make women look dowdy. “Nothing can be more chic and sexy if you know how to wear them right. You just have to be a bit fussy to see they have a really perfect fit round the waist. Then all you have to do is put them on with a certain belief and dash—and you are away.”
    She once told me that the little platoon of women who were under her wartime command had had statistically by far the highest pregnancy rate of all the women who joined the services in the British Isles. “It was all too ghastly and shaming, darling ... I’m speaking from the point of view of a Captain. We were stationed in this nightmare camp—stuck away in some dreadful rainy mountains in Wales. There was an R.A.F. station right near by and that was fatal ... We had a huge corrugated-iron barn on our premises and I knew that my girls were all in there most of the night just screwing away. Well, I was the one who was meant to go into that barn with a flash-light torch to enforce military discipline. Can you imagine anything worse? Can you blame me for not being able to face it? I didn’t want to stir up a terrifying hornet’s nest of furious R.A.F. men in their under-pants ...”
    One day Aunt Lavinia rang me up to say that it was too maddening, she was in prison. When I sounded astonished she admitted that it wasn’t exactly a prison, but it was just as bad, for she was being detained in a hospital where she had been put by the police. She then explained that she had tried to commit suicide two days before—that it had been “infuriating,” for the whole thing had failed. “I had it all perfectly planned, darling. It couldn’t have been more Roman ... I was in my bath with my bottle of whisky for courage, and my gleaming razor. It all went like a dream. It didn’t even hurt. And then I suddenly noticed that all my bath water had turned some quite amazing hue of scarlet. It made me feel completely sick. There’s something unexpectedly ghastly about finding oneself in a bath full of gore and melting soap. Anyway, after that, I somehow don’t