Chapter 5: Polly - The Golden Hours

Polly woke gradually and reluctantly on Christmas Day, leaving a rather luxurious dream involving ripe peaches, and spurred softly on by her sense of responsibility. She rolled over against Gerald and the phrase came to her about the hurly-burly of the chaise longue, and the deep peace of the marital bed. Her marital bed was deeply, deeply peaceful. Even on Christmas morning: the big children were too old to rush in and mob them, and Pen and Buttercup had each other to be hysterical with, and London Nanny to corral them. It made Polly a little sad. She loved nothing more than a big bed full of small children on Christmas morning, shrieking and giggling and throwing wrapping paper everywhere. Soon they would all be too old and grand. The horse-mad twins, frog-eyed like Gerald and dark like her, hair they still refused to cut, were thirteen now and would soon start falling in love all the time. Poor dear Andrew. Funny little Pen. This might be the last year they would all join in with unalloyed enthusiasm, before entering the years of delicate dignity and infinite self-absorbed vulnerability.

She wriggled herself away from Gerald, deep asleep beside her, wondering if she might sneak off and join the hysteria in the nursery. His arm shot out.

‘Not so fast,’ he murmured, pulling her down to him.

‘Go and brush your teeth,’ she said, amenably.

‘I’ll get cold,’ he said. ‘We’ll lose the spontaneous rapture of being half asleep – look, there it goes . . .’

‘My eyes are still shut,’ she mumbled.

‘. . . bounding across the floor . . .’

‘Well, don’t kiss me then,’ she said, and so he limited his kisses to her neck. The thought slipped across her mind that she was never asked to brush her teeth. Gerald’s conviction of her perfection seemed to have no limits.

Polly had been twenty-one when Gerald first brought her to Fakenham Hall. His father had died; his mother decamped to Europe, South Africa, Argentina. What babies we were! she thought. She remembered it so clearly: the drive so long, the oak avenue half felled, and at the end the huge hideous house, looking like a cross between a mental hospital and a Battenberg cake. So huge, so pink and yellow . . . the acres of sickly brickwork, the dull fleshy architraves, the crenellated towers, the grounds awash with swathes of overgrown box and yew, foetid lake to the left, collapsing glasshouses to the right . . . And inside, almost worse: the complex layout; so many corridors, so many doors into so many little rooms that didn’t really need to exist. So many internal windows that you couldn’t see through because the glass was frosted. ‘It’s stately without being much of a home,’ he had said. ‘It appals you. I was afraid it might.’ She remembered the look on his face when he’d said that was why he’d had to show it to her. Now she felt it was the same look that a widower or divorcé might wear when introducing his demanding and unattractive children to a prospective new wife. Please love it, for my sake. I’m trying to do the right thing. Look, no secrets. He had told her it was now his, it couldn’t be sold because of an entailment, and the National Trust wouldn’t touch it. She had realised they weren’t just there to choose furniture for his flat in London, which she had assumed to be the premise of the visit. He’d said how much nicer it would be to have an actual white elephant, and perhaps that was the moment she fell in love with him. And then it had become the most extraordinary day of her life.

The house had appalled her. People say if the bones are good, you can achieve anything. The bones of Fakenham Hall were terrible – or at least terrible for now. They might have been wonderful for 1903. Endless servants’ bedrooms (tiny and windowless, many of them), marathons of corridors where an array of moulds marched relentlessly in black spots across the huge walls like Napoleon’s armies on maps of Russia. (That had been a joke of Gerald’s. She smiled to think of it.) And practically no bathrooms. It must have been one of the last buildings in the country made without plumbing upstairs. Whoever thought it up had never imagined a world without staff, that was certain. Everything was in the wrong place and at the wrong angle, in the wrong proportions and too far away. Two ballrooms! Half an acre of wine cellar! The best you could say was that it was extremely solid. At least it hadn’t fallen down – though she had felt that Gerald might have preferred it if it had.

Lots of people with big houses were letting them fall down in those days – or indeed helping them to. They didn’t have much choice: death duties at eighty per cent; no staff to be found; neglect and damage after having been taken over during the war by hospitals and evacuated schools and, worst of all, soldiers who couldn’t tell a Van Dyke portrait from a dartboard . . .

Some years after that first visit to Fakenham, she and Gerald had happened to be visiting friends in Shropshire when Tong Castle was demolished. It was to be a public spectacle, rather like a hanging in the old days, she’d thought morosely. She hadn’t wanted to go at all, and Gerald even less so: ‘It’s a simple failure,’ he’d said. ‘They’re just giving up. A betrayal of trust.’ But the friends wanted to go, so they’d gone. There was quite a crowd gathered. The house itself Polly found romantic and beautiful, with its great cupola, white crenellations, and porticos, and indeed crenellated porticos. Only later, as her interest in houses began to extend beyond loving pretty things into knowing about them, did she learn that the style was called Strawberry Hill Gothic, and that the grounds had been designed by Capability Brown. It had been a warm summer’s day, a sleepy-bee kind of day, lush with burgeoning damsons and tall cow parsley along the roadsides and canal banks. A day for swimming, or reading, or cricket, for drinking a gin fizz on a lawn, under a tree, while someone else makes dinner – not a day for destruction. They’d come up the long drive through the heat-hazed parkland to find an actual military operation going on – sappers from the Royal Engineers had made boreholes all around the building. Gerald took a mild interest in the technicalities. ‘A hundred and thirty-six pounds of plastic explosive,’ he noted, ‘and seventy-five of amatol.’ The church windows had been opened to cope with the blast. Lord Newport, later the Earl of Bradford – Gerald knew him somehow, his name was also Gerald – had fired the charges. Polly found she couldn’t watch: the massive noise, smoke blooming and flowing around the base of the castle, and then a terrible pause, suddenly reminiscent of the doodle-bugs over London during the war, and the collapse of the walls, the windows, the rooms, the dome – like a woman whose legs failed beneath her, crumbling and falling to her knees, and to the ground. Clouds of dust mingled with the smoke. The smell was suddenly disgusting, dry and fusty, full of bared secrets.

‘Finishing Hitler’s work for him,’ someone said in the crowd, but it was lost in the oohs and aahs. Polly had reached quickly for Gerald’s hand, and found it reaching for hers. The grip, a quick glance, had told each of them that they would never, ever do this to their own ungainly home.

And later on, in the car, he’d said, ‘It was a kind of murder.’ He’d hit the steering wheel with the base of his palm.

She hadn’t minded that the Hall was in such terrible condition when she first came there. Actually, she had liked it, though she didn’t immediately let on about that. It had called out to her: Love me! Look after me! Nobody had taken care of it for ages: the oak panelling was dry and ashy-looking, great stripes of jazzy black and white mushrooms – rather art deco, she’d thought – were growing in the library, and the faded silks on the walls of the main rooms bore many unfaded squares from where Gerald’s mother had sold the good pictures. Luckily, she had not found the Turner watercolours in the maid’s attic bedroom. Lucky too that Polly had. (Really, she’d thought, it was like a Georgette Heyer or something: the lord – albeit not handsome – the house, the undiscovered treasure, the happy-ever-after.) Gerald, bless him, hadn’t even known how many bedrooms there were. They’d been going to count as they went round that first day, but they’d got rather distracted, and came back downstairs engaged to be married. And since then, nobody had ever got round to it.

She remembered the first night she stayed here, lying in a guest bed in a borrowed Victorian nightdress, after Gerald had proposed and she hadn’t had to consider for a second before saying yes. Even then she’d thought the challenge of this building would probably take her all her life. She’d recognised how absolutely opposite it was to the house she’d dreamt of and planned in her mind even as a small child. Polly had always wanted a house – more than romance, more than adventure, more than money or achievement. She used to save up her pocket money to buy beautiful old things in the gloomy antique shops on Kensington High Street and Portobello Road, which were one day to go into the house she yearned for, which would be a white Georgian sugar-cube, with verandas on all sides, French windows, wooden shutters, wide lawns and blowing roses. Gracious, elegant. A dolls’ house made large.

Clary and Louise would laugh at her for it, and her mother Sybil had thought her antiques habit eccentric and unhygienic. But the big, precious, blue-and-white Delft china candlesticks she’d bought thirty years earlier for sixpence sat even now on the mantelpiece of her bedroom, and she loved them just as much as she ever had. Not only for their beauty and the fact that she’d saved them, but as symbols of determination, and a kind of loyalty to a dream.

She knew very well how to treasure old, battered things: how to polish and feed dried-out wood till it glowed, how to use a paintbrush to get dust out of the tiniest crannies in a complex piece of ceramic, what proportions of lemon juice and baking soda to use when sponging stained nineteenth-century velvet. The difference was that as a child she’d done all this to things she loved and found beautiful in the first place. Then, the moment she became an adult woman, she was presented with the most enormous, complicated job to do on a really unattractive house. But the house held secrets. The building which looked so ferociously 1900s from the outside turned out to have been constructed around a tortuous melee of older buildings. Stone remnants of a prosperous medieval manor house had been expanded and adjusted generation by generation, culminating in a burst of sheep-based eighteenth-century wealth, which was in turn largely trashed by the wealth of Gerald’s grandfather, the source of which was never quite explained. The house taught her, and she learned. The more she learned, the more she recognised and the more she loved. A bit of Grinling Gibbons in the private chapel, the oldest and least touched part of the house; some Napoleonic glass; a mural which was late pre-Raphaelite, not 1930s as she had initially thought. So she and Gerald fixed the roof, and carved out a family home – a ballroom makes a good big playroom, and a kitchen’s a kitchen even if it does have a spit big enough for two pigs. Half of one wing they allowed to fall down, strategically and gracefully, planting trees among the arches, inserting jack posts as required (clematis, she found, climbed them happily) and digging some ponds. The deer loved it, and Simon introduced a great many varieties of snowdrop. Under Polly’s loving care, the Hall reclined into a happier mix of loved and collapsing. It had become almost beautiful. Climbing roses can go a long way. In both senses.

‘It’s almost as if you kissed two frogs,’ Gerald had said, his pale and rather bulbous eyes full of affection.

‘About seventeen, more like,’ she’d replied.

Beauty doesn’t maintain itself. Every big house has to wash its face, and Fakenham’s took a lot of washing. Gerald’s idea of ‘haven’t a bean’ was different to Polly’s – she, after all, had been earning her living in London while Gerald was failing to study law and being given his muddy little flat in Pimlico. Though he didn’t have much money, he had stuff all right. Despite Gerald’s mother’s depredations, Fakenham Hall was still full of stuff. But it’s not that easy to sell stone balustrades or third-rate eight-foot-high oil paintings of ugly dead relatives, and furthermore neither of them felt it was proper. And Gerald refused outright to sell land. The only thing worse than selling land would be opening to the public.

‘How about we open to the private?’ Polly said. ‘Like when we do the village fête. It’s not really opening. Just some good local involvement . . .’ She had desperately hoped that Gerald would be convinced by this legerdemain, and he was. Both Gerald and the Hall were gradually dragged into shape and put to work. Nobody could remember later whose idea it was, but they fixated from the beginning on weddings. Who wouldn’t want to marry in a lovely stately home? Or even a horrid one?

The chickens were ousted from the chapel, Polly buttered up the vicar and chose the paint colours, Simon was appointed Keeper of the Fabric, oiling the woodwork and mowing the lawns. Rachel tried to keep the books; Gerald signed things off, paid the bills and had a word with the bishop about reconsecration. Not all the young people in the village were riding motorcycles into Norwich to work in the car factory, so help was hireable. It became apparent after a couple of failures that guests would need their own entrance, car parking area, lavatories, and somewhere to have a glass of champagne or a cup of tea afterwards . . . Well, that could be done. The mere idea of new plumbing gave everybody bad dreams, but they got through it. A lady called Mrs Monkhurst had descended on them. Alarming though she was, with her clipboard, her good cashmere, and her knowledge regarding what would acceptably count as mayonnaise (not salad cream, apparently) and where to get a good little band, she really had sorted them out. Admittedly for an initially alarming percentage. But now, it functioned. Literally, Gerald had said. The entire ground floor and first floor of the east wing were available to hire: bedrooms, bathrooms, chapel, parlours, a new little kitchen, lavatories aplenty, the large ballroom and the conservatory leading off.

When it all became too much, Polly retired to the Ruinous Wood or the gardens, where she, Simon and Gables, who had been there for ever, worked in companionable silence. She loved to clip: tight nearer the house, looser and more flowing further away. Cloud-pruning like a Japanese print. The flow and variety pleased her. Simon loved to clear up and sweep, so that worked well. Gables liked digging and knowing best. Together, apart, they drifted round the evergreens, and gradually order had been restored. One misty afternoon Gables found Polly in the Knot Garden which adorned the eastern lawn below the terrace, north of the old linden avenue that led to the church. She was trying to clip a small yew into a sphere. He went off and came back with a rusted iron hoop, and showed her how to use it as a frame. Next time she was in Norwich she acquired a pair of light long-bladed shears, perfect for clipping new growth to shape, and the following spring he showed her how to clip a young box so it would grow into the shape of a small bear, the simplest of topiary animals. Louise, always the Shakespearean, christened it the Earl of Wiltshire, because it was bushy and green: ‘“Is Bushy, Green and Earl of Wiltshire dead?”’ she declaimed. ‘“Ay, all of them at Bristol lost their heads.” Not his best couplet. Richard the Second.’

One Christmas, Gerald gave Polly an enormously tall stepladder. She climbed it in her wedding dress, noble against the wide Norfolk sky, the train cascading, for a photographer from Vogue doing a feature on modern young duchesses and countesses, aristocratic châtelaines of stately homes.

When at last Gerald went to brush his teeth, leaving her uxorious and glowing in the messy bed, she opened her eyes properly. The room was full of snowlight, framed by the malachite-green damask drapes of the old four-poster, and the long curtains and pelmet at the window. Beyond the window, nothing but white greeted her. Grey-white sky, pearly light. Snow on snow on snow.

Christ it was cold.

‘Happy Christmas!’ she called out to him. ‘What time is it?’

‘Well before stocking time,’ he said. He was wearing both his dressing gowns, she noticed, and his yellow Moroccan slippers. ‘We have about four minutes. Excellent timing.’ He was at the credenza where he kept his electric kettle on a tin tray. Long gone were the days when staff could be rung for at any time of day or night to bring whatever one wanted, always at the wrong temperature because the old place is so big, but Gerald had arranged that Her Ladyship would always be able to have a cup of tea, a hot one, first thing if she wanted it. Which she always did. He had even acquired a small electric fridge for his dressing room, which Mrs Dodds, who came in from the village to keep the domestic part of the house, would ensure was stocked with fresh milk. It also held a bottle of sherry for those evenings when their Lordyships, as the children called them, preferred to spend an evening away from the rest of the family.

It was fortunate that Polly loved her family so easily. With a place so large, there would have been no way of refusing them, even had she wanted to. It was at Christmas 1958 that Polly and Gerald had first talked about her father Hugh and stepmother Jemima moving to Norfolk. They wouldn’t put it to them quite so explicitly. Darling Dad! There was no way he would ever willingly leave London. And certainly he would never move for his health, which he always said was absolutely fine. But it was a fact that the first war had not just robbed him of his arm, it had also, with the headaches, the insomnia, the shrapnel that still lay inside his head almost half a century later, taken his peace of mind and the natural relaxation on which a healthy person relies.

Hugh and Jemima had lived for ever at the top of Ladbroke Grove, in a tall white-stucco house in a terrace that looked like a fading wedding cake. ‘It’s far too big,’ they’d been saying to each other for some years, after an equal number of years saying that it was really too small. There was always discussion about which end of Ladbroke Grove actually was the top – the south end, smarter, leafier, near Holland Park, or the north end, rough, towards the canal and the railway. To the Cazalets, their end was the top, because it was at the top of the hill. But it wasn’t that far to the other top where, in September, over the bank holiday that year, riots had broken out. What actually happened depended on which newspaper you read: Archie had said it was because landlords were grinding everybody for rent which nobody could afford, and setting people against each other; Uncle Edward had said it was because all the coloured chaps (he actually used a worse word, which Louise told him quite sharply was simply not acceptable, it wasn’t the 1880s any more) were coming over here expecting special treatment; Clary said it was rather more complicated than that. Anyway, at the height of it gangs of young men were lurking and threatening, running and fighting with knives in the streets. Nobody knew what was going to happen. The police seemed to have no control, the family couldn’t leave the house, and Hugh, for the first time in his life, seemed to be having wartime flashbacks. Jemima had told Polly that he had said, quietly, that it was the smell: of anger and fear and young men. It only stopped when the weather broke, thunderstorms snapping the pressure and sending everyone indoors. ‘PC Rain,’ said their local bobby, with evident relief. It had been unbearable and terrifying for everybody.

Then when Hugh had the heart attack, possibly not the first, a few months later at New Year, it was too much. What if there was another riot? Another heart attack brought on and the household cut off? ‘You must come here,’ Polly had said. There was no question. In the end, it had worked out well. That spring Hugh and Jemima had taken Laura out of school and moved them all to Fakenham Hall. In return Polly and Gerald had use of the Ladbroke Grove house. Hugh had called this Operation Lear, but had taken it in good grace. Tonbridge, after all, lived at Fakenham, and Hugh liked little more than being driven around by him, talking politics. After a while, it occurred to Hugh that owning a house and keeping it effectively empty was pointless, and he took on a tenant upstairs, as well as the one in the basement flat.

Polly ran through the guests in her head. Louise’s father Edward had said he’d come if somebody would give him a lift, and they hadn’t heard from him again, so that was that. Aunt Villy, his first ex-wife, funnily enough had said the same, and then rung up to say it was too far and she wasn’t feeling well, which made Polly feel a bit – but not very – bad about not trying to arrange some kind of lift for her. But St Leonards to north Norfolk is not just a slog, it’s an awkward slog. She could have come by train, Polly thought, a little crossly. She’s not that old – then realised that she didn’t know how old Aunt Villy was. Or what actually counted as old. She certainly wasn’t as old as the old aunts, Dolly and Flo. Ancient aunts, she thought, with skin like gently rotting strawberries – who had said that? Neville probably, the little beast. Anyway, they were long gone. How had they travelled? she wondered – and it seemed to her that they hadn’t; they’d just always been there, together, squabbling softly, until then they weren’t. Perhaps the twins will be like that when they’re old, she thought.

Uncle Rupert and Zoë were already in the Yellow Room, and Clary and Archie were in the Chinese Room. They were the most relaxing guests, the kind of relatives who made family a good thing, rather than something mildly threatening as sometimes happened, especially in novels. Cousin Teddy, Louise’s brother, had sent a sweet telegram from Accra saying he’d bloody love to but it just wasn’t going to happen, which was fair enough. Neville was still in New York being, apparently, terribly successful, and had, apparently, said to Clary that he’d ‘try to fly over’, as if flying over for Christmas was the sort of thing he did every day, which Polly thought was sweet of him, but Clary felt was showing off. There didn’t seem to be any sign of Juliet. Lydia, Louise’s sister, had said she wouldn’t miss it for the world, and was getting the sleeper down from Edinburgh and making a trip of it as she needed a new coat and apparently it was impossible to get a decent coat in Scotland, which didn’t seem likely, you’d think they’d have plenty of coats. She’d arrived the night before and would sleep till lunch if she could. (Polly hoped she would, to be frank. A little of Lydia went a long way.) She hadn’t brought her husband, which was perhaps just as well. He never, ever stopped talking. Never. It made one want to shoot him. Gerald used to wonder if he had circular breath like a jazz saxophonist.

And he had a carrying voice. Perhaps Lydia was a little deaf.

Wills, the younger of Polly’s two brothers, still in the army, though he didn’t have to be and he seemed to like it, had asked for leave but hadn’t got it. Rather awfully she’d completely forgotten to invite Jamie and Susan, Edward’s children from his second marriage, but it had been so long since she’d seen them and they had been boring then. For about thirty seconds she wondered if this was something she should feel guilty about, thought it probably was, but it was too late now. If they’d wanted to come, they would have come, wouldn’t they? And given Edward’s not even coming . . . I mean, she thought, where does obligation end? Uncle Edward’s second ex-wife’s children by her first husband? But she didn’t like thinking like that. It shouldn’t be about obligation. It should just be about family affection and . . .

Gerald had had to talk to her about wanting to be perfect. Well.

Roly, Louise’s youngest brother, had said he planned to show up, in a rather lackadaisical kind of way; then only rang yesterday to say he wouldn’t after all, he had a new job starting in Hong Kong and was leaving on Christmas Eve. It was hard for the young men, Polly felt. They just didn’t know what they wanted. Or perhaps they just didn’t talk about it. She’d hardly seen him since he’d graduated. Tom and Henry, Jemima’s boys, had said they would spend Christmas with their late father’s mother, so that was kind, though it probably made Jemima sad. She was so self-contained it was hard to tell.

Clary and Archie’s Harriet was to have gone in with Laura, but apparently the chimney hadn’t been swept and there had been rather a mucky fall and no time to clean it up, so they were in the Violet Room instead. The boys – Archie and Clary’s Bertie, and Rupert and Zoë’s Georgie – were in the smaller rooms along the east corridor upstairs. She did wish they’d be kinder to Andrew. Though at the same time she fully understood why they weren’t. He was rather a prig. What a thing to say about your own son! But he was. They should never have let him know he was going to inherit the title. The others ragged him rather mercilessly, and Mrs Tonbridge didn’t help, calling him ‘his little Lordship’ and being frankly feudal about it.

At least five of the little rooms on the east-wing corridor were newly painted and the beds made up, in case anybody changed their minds and came after all, though the corridor itself was still lined with glass cases full of carefully labelled stuffed things that Polly didn’t care to look at every day. ‘The Last Grey Buzzard Shot In Europe 1842’, and so forth. All those poor hares. Buttercup was in with Pen, as usual, and London Nanny in her chamber leading off.

Polly had made a toy stegosaurus for Buttercup; she’d finished it two days earlier. It was of greeny-gold velvet, with piping round the plates and spikes. Gerald had found her a book of palaeontology to see what they looked like – ‘You always think you know what they look like, and actually you don’t,’ Polly had pointed out. They had laughed at the description on the diagram, with the little arrow pointing: ‘Small head and tiny brain’. ‘Like me,’ said Pen, comfortably, when she explained to him what his parents were finding hilarious.

Gerald handed her her tea. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten anything?’

‘No. And if you have, Rachel will have it all in hand.’ It was a phrase which frequently crossed his lips, and indeed Polly’s, and many other people’s. Sometimes it was followed by the remembrance that Rachel was the same age as the century, and at some stage would need a holiday. Though the effort needed to persuade her to take one would mean the person doing the persuading would need a holiday too.

‘Have I got presents for everyone?’ Polly asked.

‘Well, how could you ever know?’

Gerald was convinced that the number of people in Polly’s family changed every time she tried to count them. On his side of the family, since his older brother’s death in the war, there was only Gerald himself, his mother Laetitia – the Threat, he called her, because there was always the threat that she might visit – and his sister, who had married as far away as possible (from the Threat, Gerald said) and now had several children in New Zealand, and no intention to return. Polly had never met her. (She seemed more ancient history even than the stegosaurus.) His family hadn’t always been small: in the downstairs east-wing back loo hung a massive Victorian family tree, on foxed and mottled paper, in a heavy frame. It had been drawn up by some Scottish ancestor of Gerald’s, and – if you took a torch and peered carefully – you could make out that it traced the Lisles in a direct line back to Adam and Eve.

‘Stella!’ Polly squeaked. ‘Did Louise say Stella might come?’ She quickly racked her mind to see what she might have remaining in the present chest. The lilac cashmere scarf? The bottle of L’Air du Temps? She wasn’t sure Stella was an Air du Temps kind of girl. Or one for lilac cashmere. She was so intellectual it was hard to give her nice things. Actually, London Nanny might like the scarf. She was rather naturally glamorous.

Stocking time! After much argument among the children, and the parental bed being out of bounds, it had been agreed that the location was to be the big girls’ room, as it had most bed space. Polly arrived a little late, holding her mug of tea, wrapping her velvet dressing gown around her like an auburn-haired Burne-Jones saint. Gerald pulled an extra chair in from the corridor and looked on as the mayhem ensued. Polly could see he was thinking uxorious thoughts, and the moment they were alone would tell her he thanked the God he only half believed in for the blessing of meeting and marrying her.

By the time Polly came downstairs, Eileen had the largest white tablecloth spread across the Jacobean table in the great hall, ironed so well it gleamed softly like the icing on a Christmas cake. The cake itself was safe in the larder. It had been made weeks ago, on Stir-Up Sunday – Pen had expressed a desire to be soaked in brandy along with the dried fruit – and sported its customary tiny snow-bound Frog Orchestra, made of wire, wood and green straw. Nobody knew why the Frog Orchestra was traditional, but traditional it was. The table was fully laid: the crystal glasses that had gone to Crimea and back with Gerald’s great-grandfather; the silver fruit basket; the pristine linen napkins; the napkin rings in an array of exotic hardwoods that the Brig, Polly’s grandfather, had brought back from West Africa as samples for the company – ébène, aloa rouge, amazakoue, bete, makore, assamela, dibetou and bois de fer. Polly remembered memorising their names in French, while he told her about camels and deserts, blue turbans, red sunsets, immense trees with roots high enough to serve as walls for the shelters built between them.

The birds were in the oven already, smelling delicious. The bread sauce waited for its cream; the potatoes were ready to be parboiled, the goose fat primed for heating. The pudding steamed merrily, bobbing softly in the bubbling water. The Christmas tree soared, dripping with silver bells, its old moth-eaten fairy lurching at the top, and the tiny twisty red candles in their metal clips standing at the ends of each branch, waiting to be lit. The pile of presents underneath grew every time somebody came nipping down with something they’d forgotten. Louise’s gifts were the biggest and shiniest; the children’s were wrapped in anything from loo paper and sticky stars to silver paper clearly purloined from the kitchen. Someone seemed to have used pages from The Beano. Under the mantelpiece packed with Christmas cards the fire was burning bright and steady – Simon had found an excellently huge log, what Tonbridge called ‘a proper Sunday-afternooner’. The sherry and Ritz biscuits were laid out in the drawing room ready for before lunch, and the port decanted for afterwards.

Everything seems to be all right, thought Polly, glancing out of the window, and seeing a tiny patch of blue emerging through a rip in the grey snowlit cloudbank. It made her heart flinch. Happiness had always frightened her. It was just asking to be shattered.

Rachel appeared – was Polly coming to church? Hugh and Jemima were planning to drive; Edward had apparently just turned up, in a small sports car of all things; the children wanted bacon and eggs and Rupert was saying he was willing to do it; Clary and Archie were feeding the chickens.

‘We’re all going to church,’ said Polly, mildly shocked. ‘It’s Christmas!’