‘You give Nanny and me fits’ – meet the

by Ariane Bankes

288pp, Duckworth, £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£18.99, ebook £9.99

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Beautiful, cultured and struck down in her prime, Mamaine Paget would make a captivating ghost. Ariane Bankes knows this well, having grown up in the wake of her aunt’s absence. “Mamaine [was] the shadowy third in our relationship,” Bankes writes of life with her mother, Celia, Mamaine’s twin. Born in 1916, and orphaned before their teens after an unconventional and isolated childhood, the Paget twins had been each other’s mainstay through all the troubled early20th-century affairs that Bankes narrates in The Quality of Love, her tribute to the two women.

Bankes is fortunate to have a series of loving letters the girls’ father left documenting their childhood. “You are TARTARS just now,” he wrote in 1925. “You crawl about in the ivy & give Nanny & me fits.” Their mother had died a week after their birth, yet the girls seem to have had everything they required for happiness: access to their father’s library, several pets, each other. The rural idyll ended only with the decline of their father’s health, which saw them dispatched to the hated boarding school from where they learned of his death some months later. They became wards of a wealthy uncle and were eventually, unwillingly, launched in London “society”. Escape came via Mamaine’s affair with Dick Wyndham, the Bright Young Thing who introduced them to an array of writers, painters and musicians.

From this point on, The Quality of Love is shaped by the men in the sisters’ lives. The cast is impressive – between them, the sisters could count Albert Camus, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson and the QC Jeremy Hutchinson among their admirers. Much of Mamaine’s life would be governed by her long entanglement with Arthur Koestler, whom she eventually married (and divorced).