Peoples Choice 2010: Stalking Ella Ryman

By Anna Keir

Of course I’d realised early on that Ella wasn’t writing autobiography. It wasn’t as simple as that. She would have only been a child when Sophie, her first heroine, spends the night fire watching and next day falls asleep on the Heath, under a sky of barrage balloons, to be woken by an awareness of Hector Marsham, her deceptively ingenuous nemesis, the second before he enters her life, throwing himself down on the grass and offering her a cigarette.

Ella was born in 1934, which made her now forty-three, around the same age as Mrs. Horvath. I’d assumed her sleekly youthful appearance on a recent dust jacket was from an earlier era and was keen to see how she’d matured. I’d read in the local paper that – as usual – she was spending the summer in Tuscany, but I hung around, soaking up her world. And one afternoon in early autumn my persistence was rewarded. There she was having afternoon tea with her children at a window table in the Konditorei Aida, and not looking a day over thirty.

Ella was known for her accessibility. She said she felt protected in this part of London, where nearly everybody was somebody. Still, seeing her was a surprise. I went cautiously into the Aida and sat a discreet distance away, cradling my black coffee and eyeing the pyramids of creamy cakes ranged along the marble topped counter. It was gloriously warm and I was able to remove my coat and charity-shop cardigans, revealing my rose rayon frock with the embroidered crossover bodice.

Ella wore what I came to know as her trademark black jeans, flared gently over stack-heeled boots, her mustard yellow jumper was definitely a skinny rib and she’d draped a fur jacket – research later revealed it to be chinchilla – casually over the back of her chair. She was enviably slender but possessed of a healthy appetite and from then on I noted that each Thursday she put away two chocolate covered cappuccinos and a slice of strudel with whipped cream. While she ate she monitored her children’s manners, making sure they didn’t soil their immaculate green and silver uniforms.
Perhaps it was as early as our third outing to the Aida that I began to have doubts. I was a young woman at war with my weight and my fantasies of rationing, derived largely from Ella’s writings, were a strategic arm of my campaign. It wasn’t as if I’d seriously expected her to say, just a black coffee for me thanks. After all there’s a war on. But two cappuccinos? Mrs Horvath would have been appalled at such excess.