ended she was 20, and managing her own career. It helped that she was a beautiful redhead of outstanding talent, but she still struggled to find work at first and asked both Eve and Peter for an allowance to see her through. Both refused, saying she should join an orchestra to earn her keep, but she knew she would be trapped if she did that.
She was determined to be recognised as a unique talent while she was still young, and she went on to become one of Europe’s leading solo performers, partly by investing in herself. She paid for tuition from others of great merit. One of those was Pierre Fournier, with whom she had an affair. He was married with a child and the same age as Peter Fleming. She later said that the Fournier tuition had come to abrupt close when Peter discovered their love affair and visited the cellist in his London hotel room. There was a lively exchange of views, after which the white-faced lover called the whole thing off, telling Amaryllis that he would never feel safe as long as he feared that one of her brothers might come after him with a pistol. What she did not know, but Peter almost certainly did, was that during the war Fournier had earned generous fees by performing on a German-funded radio station that broadcast to Vichy France.
In 1945 Peter and Celia Fleming were living in Oxfordshire and bringing up their son, Nicholas, aged 6; they would soon have two daughters as well. Celia had reservations about Ian. In 1940, when Peter was an officer in the British Expeditionary Force in Norway, the Daily Sketch had reported his death in action. Eve and Celia were devastated, and Celia never got over a suspicion that Ian could have prevented Lord Kemsley from printing such an error.
Peter remained a popular author. At the start of the war he had found time to write The Flying Visit , a gentle satire in which Hitler floats down from the sky somewhere in the Home Counties. After much puffing and sliding and scavenging across muddy countryside he arrives at a village hall where a talent contest in full swing. When he takes the stage everyone thinks he is a comic turn and he wins a pound of butter. Much put out by being laughed at – and dismissed as a disgrace by his pre-war admirer Lord Scunner – he is captured and kept as a prisoner of war. Upon his deportation the German government, having employed a double in his absence, sends the real Hitler back.
Peter Fleming’s war opened in the Grenadier Guards and ended in India and the Far East. In between, among other things, he was engaged by Lieutenant-Colonel Gubbins to help set up the Auxiliary Units, secret commando-type units of the Home Guard that would become active only in case of invasion. Members of the Auxiliaries were trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare. They were the military predecessor of 30AU, and many of the soldiers had served in The Independent Companies in Norway.
Richard went back to the bank. It seemed that you did not need to be a financial genius to run a merchant bank after the war. If you were family, you took advice, and you sat on the Board, and you made decisions based on that advice. There were no major mergers or acquisitions, no upheaval. The City went on much as it always had, with the clearing banks doing what they did, and the Barings, Rothschilds and Flemings occupying their own niches.
Eve had become eccentric. At the start of the war she had chosen to live in an old abbey in Berkshire that was supposed to be haunted. Her companions were her crotchety maid Hilda (the one who called her ‘The Great I Am’) and, in the school holidays, sulking Amaryllis. The house in Cheyne Walk was shut up, and later on it was hit by a bomb, so in 1944, when the German attacks had died down, Eve took a flat in Knightsbridge. The following year she moved to No. 21 Charles Street, a smart Mayfair Georgian terrace with four storeys and a basement. She was in her element again, overseeing its redecoration. And Ian moved quite