The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  ‘It is a pity,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to take you on somewhere to dance.’

  ‘Were you?’ She could not entirely suppress her disappointment. ‘How did they know you were at the restaurant?’

  ‘I always leave a number with any serious case if I’m going out. It’s all part of the job. I don’t have a partner.’

  As he dropped her back at the mansion block, he said, ‘Do you mind if I don’t see you in?’

  ‘Of course not. Thanks for the dinner. It was lovely to go out.’

  ‘It was lovely to go out with you,’ he returned. ‘Perhaps we could go dancing on another occasion?’

  ‘Perhaps we could.’

  He watched while she ran lightly up the steps and opened the door to the block with her key. She turned and waved, and he blew her a kiss. It was the first time she had gone out to dinner alone with a man who was not Rupert, since her marriage, and she felt herself back on ground that was both familiar and exciting.

  The next day she went home again to fetch an evening dress, and two evenings later, he took her to the Gargoyle. He was a divine dancer, the band played all her favourites and the head waiter greeted her by name. This time, no telephone call interrupted them: she wore her old white backless dress (after all, it would not seem old to him) and a green velvet ribbon round her throat with a diamanté buckle stitched onto it and her old, comfortable green shoes that were so good for dancing. Excitement and pleasure animated her beauty, making it at once more childlike and more mysterious, and he was entrapped. He told her she was a marvellous dancer and how lovely she was – at first, lightly; she received these tentative compliments politely, like a rich woman being given a bunch of daisies. But later in the evening, when they had drunk quite a lot and his admiration ascended from compliment to homage, ‘I have never even seen anyone half so beautiful in my life,’ her responses became more serious. Confident in the effect her appearance had made, she was able to indulge in flirtatious half-truths. ‘I’m awfully dull, really. I’ve got rather a frivolous mind.’

  ‘You’re certainly not dull. Would you like some brandy?’

  She shook her head. ‘I am! And I don’t know a thing about politics and I don’t read serious books – or –’ she searched for more harmless shortcomings, ‘or go to meetings about things or do charity work.’ There was a pause, he could not take his eyes off her. ‘And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that there are a lot of pictures – drawings of women – on the walls in the bar here? Well, they are by someone quite famous called Matisse, but I can’t see the point of them all.’

  He said, ‘I do adore your honesty.’

  ‘Bet you’d get bored with it.’

  She looked at his brandy, and he beckoned the waiter. ‘You always change your mind about brandy, don’t you?’ This had happened the previous night; he was delighted in knowing something so well about her.

  She looked at him with faint reproach. ‘Not absolutely always. I never do anything always.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘And I’m hopelessly undomesticated – can’t cook to save my life – and to tell you the honest truth, I don’t think I’m even maternal. Actually.’

  But he was too far gone to recognise the honest truths.

  And now – what was it? – eight days later, she realised that the whole thing had gone far enough. He was madly in love with her. He had tried to get her to bed with him, but she had resisted what she found to be a surprisingly strong temptation. This had made her feel quite self-righteous in her telephone conversations with Rupert, which had become increasingly dishonest. Mummy was making progress, but slowly, she had been saying; she could not possibly leave her until she felt happy about her being well enough to live alone. With her mother, things were different. Her mother had looked up from her novel after Zoë had finished one of her guarded telephone conversations with Philip who rang at least three times a day, and said, ‘You’re going out with him, aren’t you?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘With him. With Dr Sherlock. Does Rupert know?’

  Ignoring this, she said, ‘I’ve had dinner with him once or twice – yes. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘It can’t be right, Zoë. You have such a nice marriage – and everything. But if Rupert knows, and doesn’t mind, I suppose it’s all right?’

  Zoë still didn’t reply to this tacit question, and her mother had not the courage to ask again.

  Zoë told Rupert never to ring after seven in the evening, as it might wake her mother, and felt safe.

  That evening, he took her, as he had promised, to see Lupino Lane in Me and My Girl. She enjoyed it, and her enjoyment was heightened by the knowledge that through it he was watching her rather than the show. Afterwards, they went to the Savoy, had dinner and danced. She wore her strapless olive-green corded silk, her newest dress that she had bought because the colour matched her eyes and enhanced the white sheen of her shoulders. She had piled her hair on top of her head and fastened the green velvet ribbon with the diamanté buckle at the back (her jewellery was in Sussex, which she felt was a great pity). She knew that she looked her best, and was silently piqued because, so far, he had not told her so. However, everybody else seemed to notice her: the head waiter, the wine-waiter, even Carroll Gibbon playing the piano smiled at her, his spectacles glinting when they went onto the dance floor to dance.

  ‘You’re very silent,’ she said, at last. ‘Don’t you like my dress? I put it on specially for you. Aren’t I smart enough?’

  ‘Not smart,’ he replied. ‘That’s not how I would describe you at all.’ She felt his hand press the small of her back. ‘You’re entirely irresistible. I want you more than anything in the world.’

  ‘Oh, Philip!’

  But not much later, when they had dined, and the lights were lower, he asked whether, if they were both free, she would marry him.

  She stared at him, incredulous: he looked completely serious.

  ‘But we are married!’

  ‘In my case, only just. My wife has written saying that she thinks there may be a war, and she therefore won’t be coming back to London. She’s going to keep the children in the country. I think she would give me a divorce if I asked for it. It hasn’t been a marriage for years, anyhow.’

  ‘Poor you!’

  He looked at her with a faintly sardonic smile. ‘Don’t be sorry for me. I’ve found consolation elsewhere from time to time that has seemed adequate – until now. I am a very good lover,’ he added.

  There was a short silence: she was embarrassed. She searched for something mature and dismissive to say.

  ‘Of course, I’m awfully flattered, but, of course, it’s out of the question. Rupert would never divorce me.’

  ‘Would you want him to?’

  Afterwards, she realised, that if only she had been truthful – said that she didn’t want a divorce, that although he attracted her, she wasn’t in love with him – things might, almost certainly would, have turned out very differently. But earlier she had made the mistake of implying that things were ‘difficult’ at home and had basked in his sympathetic attention. If she had not been such a fool, she would never have got herself into this mess. For a mess it was. She realised uncomfortably that he was far more serious than she had meant him to be. His intensity frightened her, and she descended into fresh dishonesty. It would make him feel better, she thought, if she allowed him to think that she felt as he did, but was prevented by her principles from doing what, of course, they would both like. This seemed to make things easier between them, but when he was taking her home, he begged her to come back to his house with him; she refused and he pleaded with her; she refused and he kissed her; she wept and he became tender and contrite. By the time she got to bed on the sofa she was so exhausted that she couldn’t sleep, felt guilty and irritable and thoroughly out of sorts and simply wanted to get out of it all.

  The next morning, her mother, who had been worrying a grea
t deal more than she had allowed Zoë to know, announced that she was going to convalesce with her old friend, Maud Witting, who lived on the Isle of Wight and was always asking her to stay. ‘Then you can go back to Sussex, darling, where I know you’d rather be.’

  Deeply relieved, Zoë behaved, as her mother said, ‘angelically,’ packing her case, going out to buy her toiletries and the regulation box of Meltis Fruits that her mother always took when she stayed with this friend, and finally going in the cab with her to Waterloo and seeing her comfortably on the train. ‘Give my love to Rupert. Have you told him you’ll be home tonight?’

  Zoë lied about this. She knew she had not been nearly nice enough to her mother and didn’t want to worry her. But walking out of the station she felt a sense of freedom. Her mother was better and going to have a nice time instead of being cooped up in that dreary little flat, and she, Zoë, could now simply disappear so far as Philip was concerned, if she wanted to. As she had to clear out what had become a considerable wardrobe from her mother’s flat and return it to Brook Green, she decided to spend one more night in London and tell Philip that she was leaving for Sussex the next day. She managed to announce this on the telephone to him (he no longer visited her mother who was deemed well enough not to need it). There was a silence the other end, and then he said, ‘Perhaps you would rather forgo a farewell party?’ And she found herself saying not at all, she would love to see him if he felt like it. She felt she had been honest, and quite cool; if he wanted to see her, it was up to him.

  He fetched her at the usual time, they dined in Soho in a restaurant he had not taken her to before and everything seemed to be the same, but it wasn’t. She realised quite early on that he made no remark about her appearance – usually a recurring topic – and after a while this began to worry her. She was wearing a dress that by now he knew quite well, and also she had slept badly the night before, and finally she said something about this, but he simply said she looked the same to him and went on talking about whatever it was, a host of impersonal things – whether television would ever catch on to the general public – had she ever seen any? No? Of course, if it ever got away it would finish off radio and, he supposed, the cinema. ‘I would have liked to have been a film actress,’ she said.

  ‘Would you?’ he returned. ‘Well, I expect you have that ambition in common with every shopgirl in London.’ She did not like being lumped with all of them, and sulked. It wasn’t turning out at all the sort of last evening she had envisaged. Eventually, they went dancing, and he stopped talking, and things felt better. Just before they went home, he kissed her on the dance floor and she knew he still wanted her.

  He said he would come up with her to see her safely into the flat, and she said, don’t bother, she didn’t want to wake her mother. ‘Your mother?’ Yes, she was afraid they must have woken her last night and she’d promised not to do it again. ‘I promise that we shan’t wake your mother,’ he said, getting into the lift with her. ‘I just want to come in for a cup of tea and a chat. After all, it is our last evening,’ he added.

  ‘It has been fun,’ she said.

  ‘Has it?’

  She shut the front door with exaggerated quiet, and they stood in the dreary, narrow little hall. He took off her wrap and laid it on a chair.

  ‘You don’t really want tea, do you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not in the least,’ and took her in his arms and kissed her. Always before, this had been exciting, but it had been his desire that she enjoyed – her own feelings had remained secure and aloof. Now she felt herself responding, and began to feel nervous.

  She made an attempt to disentangle herself, and when he stopped kissing her, she said, ‘This isn’t talking. I think you’d better go, Philip.’

  He put his hands on top of her bare shoulders and in a neutral voice said, ‘You feel it has all gone far enough?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I do!’

  ‘You would not like us to do something we should both regret?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She tried to say it in an offhand manner, but the expression of admiring, tender attention in his eyes that she had become used to was not there, and when she looked at him, she could not tell what had replaced it. ‘Anyway, I told you, we mustn’t wake Mummy.’ In the very short silence that followed, she had time to think that the flat was horribly quiet and that nobody would ever hear her if she screamed before she saw that he was very angry, and was smiling.

  ‘Such a little cheat! Your mother rang me this morning for a prescription to be posted to her. You could have rejoined your husband today, couldn’t you? But you couldn’t resist one more evening of games! You’re very beautiful, my dear. You are also the most egocentric little creature I’ve ever met in my life. You’ve always known your own strength, haven’t you, but you know nothing about your own weakness: it’s high time you learned that.’ With one neat, sudden movement, he picked her up, carried her into the sitting room and dropped her onto the sofa.

  There followed some hours she would remember for the rest of her life with a kind of double-edged shame. Shame of a conventional sort, that it should have happened at all, and shame of a more true and insidious kind: that her resistance had been token, that she should have become utterly immersed in what had nothing to do with love-making as she had hitherto known it. For he did not woo her with sweet words – made no attempt to sue for her love – said nothing at all. He simply set about unlocking her sensuality by touch, observing each effect. Years later, when she saw a French film about men breaking into a bank and one of them feeling for the right combination of the safe, she recognised that look of acute, impassive attention, and came, and blushed in the dark. Once he had discovered what roused her, he used it, so that she, who had always been the granter of favours, became the suppliant, leading her past initial protest to compliance, until she became eager, when he withheld himself until she was frantic, was to hear her voice pleading with him for the rest of her life. Hours later, when this process had recurred and been resolved several times, she must have fallen asleep, because she realised suddenly that she was alone, with a blanket over her, the lamp still burning on the rickety table in the corner of the room, subdued by the grey morning light.

  At first she thought, He must still be here, but when she got up, with the blanket wrapped round her, she quickly found that he wasn’t. Her body felt stiff and sore, and she had a crick in her neck from sleeping awkwardly on the sofa. Her clothes from last night lay scattered on the floor where he had thrown them. Knowing that he had gone was a kind of relief. While she was having a bath, the telephone rang. But he needn’t think I’ll answer it, she thought, picking at the crumbs of her old image, the haughty, adorable Zoë who could manipulate any man and remain perfectly cool. But when it stopped ringing, she wondered what on earth he would have said to her. She found it difficult to think – at all – about anything.

  Much later, when she had dressed and made herself a cup of tea, the telephone rang again. She left it for two rings, and then picked it up. Let him speak; she would not say anything, as he had not, last night.

  ‘Zoë? Darling, I know its terribly early for you, but I felt I must ring …’

  It was Rupert. Hugh had rung last night, he said; he and Edward were worried about the way things were going, and Hugh had said that London was not going to be a good place to be if things got sticky. He had tried to ring last night, but she must have been out. So, would she bring her mother if need be and catch a train this morning? There was one at ten twenty-five, he added.

  Zoë heard herself explaining about her mother having gone, and saying that she had planned to return today, anyway. ‘Did you ring earlier?’ she asked.

  ‘Good Lord, no. You know what you’re like if you’re woken by the telephone. I’ll meet you at Battle, then. Goodbye, sweetie.’

  She put the receiver back on its hook; she was trembling and her knees were giving way. She stumbled into the sitting room and collapsed on the little gilt chair by the
lamp. It was too soon to hear Rupert. She was too raw, and confused – she needed time before she saw him again and now there wouldn’t be any. As she began to cry, she started to try and construct a version of what had happened that seemed bearable. She had gone too far with this man and he had taken advantage of her – had raped her. But he hadn’t raped her. It was not her fault that she was so desirable; he was far older, she had told him that she was married and would not ever leave her husband, so why had he not simply accepted that and gone away? But she had tried to attract him, had wanted him to be in love with her, she had not cared at all. ‘Such a little cheat!’

  He had fallen so much in love with her that he had had to make love to her, and she had felt that she owed him that, at least. But last night, she began to know, had had nothing to do with love. She had not graciously given herself to him: ‘Oh, Philip – please – please!’ He had seduced her, he was obviously very experienced – must have gone to bed with dozens of women. He had planned the whole thing from the start. If she had resisted him last night, he would probably have raped her. But if you went dancing every night with a man you knew was violently attracted to you, and then you invited him into what you knew was an empty flat, what could you expect? What was it he had said? Something about, ‘You don’t know your own weakness.’ Now, it seemed, she knew nothing else, seemed entirely to be made up of it. It was weak to be reduced into some kind of – words failed her here – an animal? A tart? But they did it for money, didn’t they? If it had been a question of money last night, it would have been she who would have paid … No reconstruction that she attempted felt true enough to be comfortable. She turned off the lamp and, wearily diminished, set about tidying her clothes from the floor, dressing and packing her case for the journey back to Sussex.