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chair and fed Edward. ‘Teddy,’ she murmured fondly as he gulped and choked his way to sated sleep. Sylvie liked them all best as babies, when they were shiny and new, like the pink pads on a kitten’s paw. This one was special though. She kissed the floss on his head.
    Words floated up in the soft air. ‘All good things must come to an end,’ she heard Hugh say as he escorted Lily and Margaret indoors to dinner. ‘I believe the poetically inclined Mrs Glover has baked a skate. But first, perhaps you would care to see my Petter engine?’ The women twittered like the silly schoolgirls they still were.
    Ursula was woken by an excited shouting and clapping of hands. ‘Electricity!’ she heard one of Sylvie’s friends exclaim. ‘How wonderful!’
    She shared an attic room with Pamela. They had matching small beds with a rag rug and a bedside cabinet in between. Pamela slept with her arms above her head and sometimes cried out as if pricked with a pin (a horrible trick Maurice was fond of). On one side of the bedroom wall was Mrs Glover who snored like a train and on the other side Bridget muttered her way through the night. Bosun slept outside their door, always on guard even when asleep. Sometimes he whined softly but whether in pleasure or pain they couldn’t tell. The attic floor was a crowded and unquiet sort of place.
    Ursula was woken again later by the visitors taking their leave. (‘That child is an unnaturally light sleeper,’ Mrs Glover said, as if it were a flaw in her character that should be corrected.) She climbed out of bed and padded over to the window. If she stood on a chair and looked out, something they were all expressly forbidden to do, then she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. Hugh stood at the back gate, waiting to escort them along the lane to the station.
    Sometimes Bridget walked the children to the station to meet their father off the train when he came home from work. Maurice said he might be an engine driver when he was older, or he might become an Antarctic explorer like Sir Ernest Shackleton who was about to set sail on his grand expedition. Or perhaps he would simply become a banker, like his father.
    Hugh worked in London, a place they visited infrequently to spend stilted afternoons in their grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead, a quarrelsome Maurice and Pamela ‘fraying’ Sylvie’s nerves so that she was always in a bad mood on the train home.
    When everyone had left, their voices fading into the distance, Sylvie walked back across the lawn towards the house, a darkening shadow now as the black bat unfolded his wings. Unseen by Sylvie, a fox trotted purposefully in her footsteps before veering off and disappearing into the shrubbery.
    ‘Did you hear something?’ Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillows, reading an early Forster. ‘The baby perhaps?’
    Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun.
    ‘No,’ he said.
    The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully.
    ‘The best one yet,’ Hugh said.
    ‘Yes, I think we should keep this one.’
    ‘He doesn’t look like me,’ Hugh said.
    ‘No,’ she agreed amiably. ‘Nothing like you at all.’
    Hugh laughed and, kissing her affectionately, said, ‘Good night, I’m turning out my light.’
    ‘I think I’ll read a little longer.’
    One afternoon of heat a few days later they went to watch the harvest being brought in.
    Sylvie and Bridget walked across the fields with the girls, Sylvie carrying the baby in a sling that Bridget fashioned from her shawl and tied around Sylvie’s torso. ‘Like a Hibernian peasant,’ Hugh said, amused. It was a Saturday and, freed from the gloomy confines of banking, he was lying on the wicker chaise-longue on the terrace at the back of the house, cradling Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack like a hymnal.
    Maurice had