Life As We Know It: Alice Smithson, reluctant keeper of the flame

Alice is the sole surviving relative of a woman named Fulvia Mountjoy

Illustration by Mark Long

'Is that from Professor Moriarty?" Alice's husband demands, seeing the envelope on the breakfast table. "He's not going to come here again, is he?" "Yes, he is, I'm afraid." "Well, can't you tell him for once that we're busy and we don't run a hotel for visiting academics?" But Alice is a kind-hearted woman, and by lunchtime a courteous note has been despatched to Professor Moriarty at the University of Loamshire's English Department telling them that he will be welcome at the Smithsons' house in Budleigh Salterton any time he wishes to call.

It sometimes seem to the Smithsons – a demure, unostentatious couple in their early fifties – that scarcely a week goes by without some researcher urging the necessity of their coming to trawl through the outsize box of letters and postcards in the attic or marvel at the contents of the family photo albums. The root of this interest lies not in anything that Alice or her husband may have done – each of them labours blamelessly for Devon County Council – but in the fact that Alice is the sole surviving relative of a woman named Fulvia Mountjoy.

Who was Fulvia Mountjoy? A good 70 years have passed since this lady's tumultuous heyday, when she drank Dylan Thomas under the table and called Evelyn Waugh a fat old bore to his face. Her accomplishments were limited to a solitary novel, entitled Nice Girls Do, yet no study of the cultural life of the 1940s fails to yield a half-dozen references to "Fulvie" and her notoriously chaotic emotional life. Four times married and four times divorced, she was, additionally, pursued by the Shah of Iran and a royal princeling, and revered by another member of the aristocracy as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".

To Mrs Smithson, who dimly remembers an elderly woman known as "Granny Mountjoy" and rather keen on the sherry, all this is somewhat mystifying. Anxious, on the one hand, that a (supposedly) distinguished forebear should be given her due, she is painfully aware, on the other, that almost everything she knows about her grandmother reveals a sulky egotist whose interest lay in detaching happily married men from their wives. Still, there is such a thing as posterity, and Professor Moriarty, keen to prosecute his theory that Fulvia had an affair with Jean-Paul Sartre, wishes that all his sources were so hospitable.