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apparently Mother did not find this disturbing.
    History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front-liners who are the exception – those who find themselves thus placed whether they like it or not and those who seek involvement. Gordon and I were front-liners, in our different ways. Jasper eminently so. Sylvia would have sat it out if she could and up to a point did, except that she had hitched herself to Gordon and therefore was towed, from time to time, into the front line. To America, of which she would happily have remained in ignorance.
    Sylvia came to see me last week. Or yesterday. I pretended I wasn’t here.
    ‘Oh dear,’ says the nurse. ‘I’m afraid it’s one of her bad days. You never know, with her…’ She leans over the bed. ‘Here’s your sister-in-law, dear, aren’t you going to say hello? Wake up, dear.’ She shakes her head, regretfully. ‘Well, why don’t you sit with her for a bit anyway, Mrs Hampton, she’ll appreciate it, I’m sure. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’
    And Sylvia, gingerly, sits. She watches the high bed with its apparatus of hoists and wires and tubes, and the figure marooned upon it. The closed eyes, the thin beaky face. She is reminded of those figures on stone tombs in country churches.There are flowers in a vase beside the bed, and others on the windowsill. Sylvia rises with an effort (the chair is low and she is stouter than she would like, alas) and goes across to have a peek at the card alongside. She glances, nervously, over her shoulder; ‘Claudia? It’s me – Sylvia.’ But the figure on the bed is silent. Sylvia sniffs the flowers, picks up the card. ‘Best wishes from…’ She cannot read the squiggle, and puts on her glasses. There is a twitch from the bed. Sylvia drops the card and scuttles back to her chair. Claudia’s eyes are still closed, but there comes the sound, unmistakably, of a fart. Sylvia, red in the face, busies herself with her handbag, hunting for a comb, a hankie…
    ‘Please, Miss Lavenham,’ I said, when I was fourteen, all guile and innocence. ‘Why is it a good thing to learn about history?’ We have got to the Indian Mutiny now, and the Black Hole of Calcutta, and are suitably appalled. Miss Lavenham, as I well know, does not welcome questions unless they are matters of dates or how to spell a name, and this one, I surmise though I do not quite know why, verges on the heretical. Miss Lavenham pauses for a moment, and looks at me with dislike. But she is equal to the occasion, surprisingly. ‘Because that is how you can understand why England became a great nation.’ Well done, Miss Lavenham. I’m sure you never heard of the Whig interpretation of history, and wouldn’t have known what it meant, but breeding will out.
    The teachers all disliked me. ‘I’m afraid,’ wrote someone on a school report, ‘that Claudia’s intelligence may well prove a stumbling-block unless she learns how to control her enthusiasms and channel her talents.’ Of course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it. It was an immense relief to me to observe that Lisa’s was merely average. Her life has been the more comfortable. Neither her father nor I have had comfortable lives, though whether we would have wished them different is another matter. Gordon’s life has also been intermittently uncomfortable, but then so, come to that, has Sylvia’s, which wouldappear to destroy my theory about intelligence and happiness. Sylvia is profoundly stupid.
    Gordon met her after the war. She was someone’s sister (naturally – just as she is now someone’s wife). He met her at a dance, found her pretty (she was), made a pass at her, took her home, started sleeping with her and, in the fullness of time, announced his engagement to her.
    I said ‘Why?’
    He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
    ‘Why that one, for heaven’s sake?’
    ‘I love her,’ he said.
    I