The Quality of Love by Ariane Bankes review – delicious portrait of the Paget twins

This evocative account of the author’s mother and aunt – identical sisters who stole the hearts of London’s 1930s intelligentsia – captures their closeness and lust for life

Somewhere in her house – though not, I think, in an attic – Ariane Bankes keeps a battered tin trunk, the precious contents of which enabled her to write this short biography of her mother, Celia, and her aunt, Mamaine, who were identical twins. Such a project, though, was quite long in the gestation – Mamaine died before Bankes was born, in 1954, and Celia, who left her the trunk full of letters, in 2002 – and I wonder if this was because she worried just a little about the story she was to tell. The Paget twins were undoubtedly beautiful, spirited and clever. As debs, they were photographed by Madame Yevonde for Tatler; their circle included Laurie Lee, Decca Mitford and Simone de Beauvoir. But their principal fascination for the modern reader lies not with their own achievements, but with their private lives. As adorable and original as they appear in the pages of this rather delicious and sympathetic book, I have to admit that I sometimes rolled my eyes at their love affairs. Live alone and like it, I thought, as yet another heart was broken, yet another man insisted he could not possibly leave his wife.

The Pagets were born in rural Suffolk in 1916, where they were brought up by their father and a doting nanny, their mother having died a week after their arrival. It was an idyllic, if isolated, childhood, one that instilled in both women a lifelong love of birds. But when they were 11, it came to a sudden and painful end: their father died, and the sisters were dispatched to Ibstock Place, the grand house of their rich maternal uncle, near Richmond, Surrey.