The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  On the same morning, Raymond rang Mill Farm at breakfast time to say that Aunt Lena had died. Nora realised that that was what must have happened because her mother was using her artificial voice. Nobody, Nora felt, could honestly be terribly sorry that Aunt Lena had died as she was frightfully old and never seemed to have enjoyed anything much, but she noticed that Aunt Villy caught her mother’s voice and they both sounded exactly the same as they said how sad it was. The funeral was to be on Monday, Jessica said, and Raymond thought that Angela and Christopher should accompany her to Frensham. ‘Oh, can’t I go too?’ Nora cried. ‘I’ve never been to a funeral!’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ said Neville. ‘Bexhill had his funeral last week. You were at it.’

  ‘A little week,’ said Louise dreamily, ‘or e’er those shoes were old, with which she followed that poor fish’s body—’

  ‘Be quiet, children! Or, if you’ve finished breakfast, go.’

  Lydia got down at once. ‘Where would you like us to go to, Mummy darling? I mean, really best like us to go?’

  ‘To hell,’ Neville said, ‘or the lav, I should think.’

  Judy, who was always a slow eater, stuffed her toast into her mouth and said, ‘Is it difficult to bury fat people? Aunt Lena was simply gigantic,’ she explained.

  ‘Judy, would you kindly shut up and leave the room!’

  ‘We’ve got to go as well,’ Louise said to Nora, to preempt being sent.

  Villy heaved a sigh of relief, and then realised that Angela was still with them.

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy, I must go or I’ll be late for my sitting.’ Rupert was actually painting her portrait from ten until one o’clock every day, an enterprise that enabled her to spend hours alone with him without having to say anything. The portrait was nearly finished, but she lived in hope that he might start another one.

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether she has got a bit of a pash for Rupert,’ Jessica said when her daughter had left the room.

  ‘Oh, well, that doesn’t matter. He’s a perfectly safe person for her to have a pash about. I expect she’s simply thrilled to have her portrait painted. Don’t you remember how excited you were when Henry Ford painted you for a fairy story?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t care about him in the least. It was just my vanity.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘Oh dear! Poor Raymond! He’s having to make all the funeral arrangements, and he’s awfully bad at that sort of thing.’

  ‘I suppose you must go to it?’

  ‘Of course I must. But I really don’t want to take the children. Christopher will get dreadfully upset and then Raymond will be cross with him, and Angela will probably sulk and say she hasn’t got the right clothes. Nor have I, come to that.’

  ‘I’ve got a black and white dress you could borrow if it isn’t too short on you. And if you leave the children here, it means you can come back sooner.’

  Although she had not told Jessica about the possibility of her being pregnant, she knew that she would miss her sister when she went away: there was nobody else with whom she had the same intimacy. In fact, being with Jessica these weeks had made her realise how lonely she usually was.

  At eleven o’clock that morning, one of the Cazalet lorries lumbered up the drive and the driver got down from his cab and tapped on the kitchen window with a stubby pencil from behind his ear. Mrs Cripps, in the throes of making an Irish stew with seven pounds of scrag end of lamb, sent Dottie to find Mrs Cazalet Senior. But Dottie was no good at finding people. She disappeared at once, but did not return as she knew better than to face Mrs Cripps with failure. Time went by; the driver got back into his cab where he ate a bun, dripping with shredded coconut, drank a Thermos of tea and read the Star. Mrs Cripps forgot about the whole thing, until she wanted the trug of Victoria plums, and realised that Dottie hadn’t brought them in from the back door where McAlpine would have deposited them. She screeched for Dottie and Eileen said she hadn’t seen her for some time, and there were the plums – the sun had come round onto them and the wasps were everywhere.

  ‘Eileen, you’d better go for Mrs Senior, although it will be one more for dinner by now, as I can see with half an eye.’ So Eileen went and knocked on the door of the drawing room where the Duchy and Sid were playing.

  ‘Most extraordinary,’ the Duchy said to Rachel and Sid when she returned to the drawing room. ‘The man has twenty-four camp beds which he says William told him to deliver. What can they be for?’

  ‘Evacuation of some kind,’ said Sid.

  The Duchy looked relieved. ‘Oh, I do hope it’s only that! You remember that awful time when he met that cricket team on the train and invited them for the weekend, and there was nothing to give them but macaroni cheese? Who do you think he wants to evacuate? Oh dear! It might be the members from his club. They all expect such rich food.’

  ‘Darling, I’m sure it won’t be. You know he likes to be on the safe side. And if he buys things, he always gets them in dozens.’ Rachel spoke soothingly, but felt a twinge of uneasiness.

  ‘Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘He’s gone to Brede. There’s supposed to be an old man there who’s a frightfully good water diviner. He wants him to sink another well for the new cottages. He said he’d be back for lunch. We’ll deal with the lorry man, darling, won’t we Sid?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Don’t let her lift anything, will you, Sid? She’s just got her back right again.’

  ‘Righty-ho.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Have you finished it?’

  ‘No – no. But I’ve got to go.’ He was wiping his brush on a rag. ‘Got to meet Zoë’s train. Hey! I’ll be late if I don’t scoot. You couldn’t clean my brushes, like a darling, could you?’

  Of course she could.

  ‘Bless your heart.’

  And he was gone. A bombshell – out of the blue. He hadn’t said a word about Zoë returning. ‘Got to meet Zoë’s train. Perhaps he didn’t want to meet her – simply had to because they were married. She got slowly to her feet. She got awfully stiff sitting with her head turned towards him, trembled sometimes with the effort of keeping still. But it was all worth it for the being alone, and for the breaks of ten minutes every hour when he gave her a cigarette and told her what a jolly good sitter she was. Would he stop – now that Zoë was back? At least, he would probably finish the picture after spending so much time on it. She went over to the easel to look at the portrait. He had painted her sitting in the large high-backed leather chair that lived at one end of the billiard room. The leather was a kind of greenish black, and he had made her sit at an angle in it but looking up at him, with her hands on her lap. In spite of her bringing a selection of her best clothes for him to choose from, he had discarded the lot and, in the end, put her into a very old silk shirt of his that was a kind of greenish white. It was far too big for her, but he had rolled up the sleeves and left two of the front buttons undone. She was divided between the intense pleasure of wearing something of his, and feeling that she looked awful in it. He had also stopped her curling her hair, tied it back with a dull green ribbon that unfortunately belonged to Zoë, and he had said that he preferred her without lipstick. She thought she looked drab and watery, he had even made her eyes look a kind of aquamarine colour. She didn’t feel it was actually like her at all. He said she looked beautiful, and what more could she want? For it to go on for ever, she thought, and felt her eyes filling with tears. Sometimes she deliberately got her pose wrong so that he would come and move her head with his hands, but he had never touched her face again. She took the brushes out of the jam jar where he had stuck them and started to wipe them on the turps-soaked rag. And it will only get worse, she thought. Not only will Zoë be here from lunch-time onwards, but we shall finish our visit and they will make me go back to London and leave him. I won’t be able to bear that.

  When Polly woke on Friday morning she felt just the same as when she had gone to sleep the night before – just as
awful and frightened and full of doom. It was like a nightmare, except that it wasn’t confined to the night: that was the only time when she hadn’t felt anything – hadn’t even dreamed about it. It seemed extraordinary that out of the blue, when everything seemed quite normal and nice with only small things to worry about, like would she manage to get chicken pox at the right time and how could she explain to the Duchy that hot milk was like a sick-making poison and therefore couldn’t do her good, that with no warning at all, the thing she had dreaded most in the world for years now should not only be probable but imminent. It had started after tea yesterday: she had gone to her favourite tree in the orchard beyond the kitchen garden – the tree that she and Louise used to share, only now Louise wasn’t interested any more and she made Clary jolly well have her own tree – and settled on the best flat branch quite high up where she could sit with her back to the trunk and read and nobody could see her. She had taken her holiday task: Miss Milliment had let them choose from a list she had made and Polly had chosen Cranford, which she was finding rather boring. So when she heard voices approaching, her attention was easily diverted. As they came nearer, she could see that it was Aunt Rach and Sid. She was just about to call out to them when she realised that Aunt Rach was crying, which was very unusual for a grown-up. Then she realised that they were stopping under the tree, and it felt too late to say that she was there. They were talking about someone called Evie and how she was making a fuss about Sid being away, and Aunt Rach suddenly cried out, ‘But if you go back to London, and there is a war, there’ll be bombs – terrible air raids – someone said that they could flatten London in two or three raids – or they may use gas – I couldn’t bear you to face all that without me!’

  ‘My precious, you’re making a whole lot of fearful suppositions. If there is a war—’

  ‘You know if the Czechs don’t accept Hitler’s ultimatum there will be. You said that yourself.’

  ‘Darling, they’re digging air-raid shelters. It was in the news.’

  ‘That won’t help against gas. Hugh said that gas—’

  ‘They’re going to issue everybody with gas masks—’

  ‘It’s not any of that. If we are all going to be killed, I want to be with you. So I beg you to ask Evie to come down here, only you must do it now. The next thing will be a state of emergency, and they probably won’t let people travel.’

  ‘Probably not. There may well be an invasion—’

  ‘Oh, don’t! Surely not that! We are an island.’

  ‘We’re also, so far as I can make out, totally unprepared for war. And I find it hard to believe that Hitler doesn’t know that. He’s calling the tune, and making the terms.’

  ‘Sid, don’t go on! Stick to the point. Stick to getting Evie down.’

  ‘The little parochial point—’

  ‘It’s all we can do, isn’t it? And it may not be for long. It may be the end – of everything.’

  There was a silence, and when Polly, trembling, leant down to look, she saw that kind Sid had her arms round Aunt Rach and was kissing her to make her feel better.

  ‘Courage, my darling, we do have each other. All right, I’ll ring Evie. If you are sure the Duchy wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘She won’t in the least. She just doesn’t want us to talk about it in front of the children. She doesn’t want them frightened.’

  They began to walk away, and were almost immediately out of sight.

  Polly stayed quite still. Her heart was thudding so hard that she felt it was trying to get out of her body. When she did start to come down out of the tree, she miscalculated the well-known route and scraped her shin badly in preventing herself from falling. She wanted to spit on the blood, but her mouth had gone quite dry. Terrible pictures were surging across her mind: this orchard, the trees blackened stumps, the ground a sea of mud, at night you would hear poor wounded people moaning – only I wouldn’t, she thought, I’d be dead by then from the bombs and gas. London might be more dangerous – well, obviously it was or Aunt Rach wouldn’t have been in such a state – but they could easily drop bombs by mistake in other places. But London – Dad – Oscar! – she would have to get Dad to bring Oscar down with him tomorrow evening – if there was a tomorrow evening. Oh, God, she should make them come down now – at once! She got to her feet and began mindlessly running towards the house.

  She had tried to ring Dad at his office: he wasn’t in, and she asked them to tell him to ring Miss Polly Cazalet back. She thought of telling Clary and asking her what she thought, but Clary’s spots were itching and all she seemed to want was for people to play Pegotty with her and the situation was far too bad for playing games. Anyway, the children didn’t know, it hadn’t been talked about in front of them. It was the grown-ups she must test. The responses she got were neither helpful nor reassuring. She tried Mr York when he brought up the evening milk from the farm, and he said he’d never trusted Germans and he wasn’t starting now – not at his time of life. She tried Mrs Cripps because she seemed to be reading a newspaper in her creaky basket chair, and she said that she thought wars were just a waste of everybody’s time and she had better things to do. When pressed about whether the newspaper was saying things about war, she said she never believed a word she read in newspapers. Perhaps, Polly thought, war wasn’t talked about in front of the servants: ‘pas devant les domestiques’, as Mummy and Aunt Villy sometimes said about things. So she tried her mother, who was sewing name-tapes into Simon’s school clothes in the day nursery with Wills sitting in a pen who was dribbling a lot and frowning at two coloured bricks that he was grasping. Polly had got more skilful at asking by now, so she started with why wasn’t Mr Chamberlain going off to see Hitler again, and Mummy said that there were a lot of things to be sorted out. And if Hitler wanted a war very badly, he could just have one, couldn’t he? Mummy said that it wasn’t as simple as that – but Polly noticed that she was beginning to look rather trapped – and then said, almost thankfully, what on earth had Polly done to her leg? Go and wash it in the bathroom and bring her the iodine and some Elastoplast. Extraordinary, to fuss about a detail like a leg when there might be a war any minute, Polly thought wearily, as she did as she was told. Then she thought that perhaps men, who after all made the wars and fought in them, didn’t talk about it in front of the ladies. The only person left was the Brig. He was in his study, which, as usual, smelled of geraniums and cigar boxes, and he was poring over a huge book on his desk with a magnifying glass.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the very person I wanted. Which one of you is that?’

  ‘Polly.’

  ‘Polly. Right. Just read me what I wrote here about the export of teak logs from Burma between 1926 and 1932, would you?’

  So, of course, she had to. Then he told her a long story about elephants in Burma, how they could judge precisely where to pick up a log with their trunks, which would not, she must understand, necessarily be in the middle at all, and how they would all stop work, drop their logs at the same moment in the afternoon, when they knew it was time for their bathe in the river. It was a much more interesting story than the ones about people he’d met in strange, or the same, places, but she was not in the mood for stories of any kind. When he stopped for a moment, and was clearly thinking of something else to tell her, she asked him quickly whether he thought there would be a war starting this weekend.

  ‘What makes you ask that, my duck?’ She saw he was trying to see her with his rather filmy blue eyes.

  ‘I just – sort of feel – there might be.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she persisted.

  He went on trying to look at her; then he gave a very small nod. ‘Between you and me,’ he said.

  ‘Dad’s in London,’ she said; her voice was trembly and she didn’t want to cry. ‘And Oscar.’

  ‘Who the devil’s Oscar? Damn silly name. Who’s Oscar?’

  ‘My cat. It isn’t a silly name for a cat. He’s named af
ter a famous Irish playwright. I don’t want him bombed to death. I want Dad to bring him down. I can have him here, can’t I?’

  He pulled a huge silk handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you sound as though you need to blow your nose. Of course you can have your cat.’

  ‘Could you make Dad come down today?’

  ‘No need for that. There may be another meeting next week and, who knows, that might just do the trick. Who’s been putting the wind up you like this, my duck?’

  ‘No one really,’ she lied. She had an instinct not to betray her aunt.

  ‘Well, don’t you worry your pretty little head any more.’ He was fishing in yet another of his numerous pockets and produced a half-crown. ‘Run along, my duck.’

  As if half-a-crown would make her feel all right! Anyway, Dad had rung her up and he said he would bring Oscar. Today, Friday, the same great weight of doom lay on her heart, but at least, in ten hours at the most, Dad would come, and she could spend the morning arranging Oscar’s food and make a bed for him to sleep in. She knew that he wouldn’t sleep in it, but he would resent trouble not having been taken.

  Miss Milliment – with an excitement that made her most inefficient – was packing. On receipt of dear Viola’s kind letter she had, as requested, gone to a public telephone box and rung Mill Farm. She hardly ever used the telephone and was terribly anxious about not hearing properly on it, but dear Viola was very clear: catch the four-twenty from Charing Cross to Battle on Friday afternoon and she would be met. Now, on Friday morning, she had her father’s largest suitcase – unfortunately, the mildew seemed to have penetrated the lining – laid on her bed and was filling it with clothes. She did not possess summer clothes as such, simply wore less of whatever she had in winter. But not having to make this kind of choice did not prevent the utmost confusion. Pale grey and coffee-coloured lisle stockings, resolutely unpaired, lay in surprising quantity on the only chair. She had no idea she had so many, and was also daunted by there being so few that matched. Pairs of enormous lock-knit bloomers were piled in one heap, and some short-sleeved woollen vests (they were uniformly pale grey) were put in another. Someone had told her years ago that when packing one should start from the skin and work outwards. But every now and then she forgot this in agonised contemplation of the choice between her bottle-green jersey ensemble or the heather-mixture tweed. There was also the problem of a cardigan – the steel grey one seemed infested with what looked like bits of dried porridge and the fawn one showed distinct signs of moth. Her best mustard and brown foulard she must certainly take for the evenings. Garters! She was always mislaying them, so better take all she could find, They did not really keep her stockings up, but they prevented them from entirely falling down. Her nightdresses – one really needed washing, but the other she had only used for a few days – were draped across the iron bedhead. There were also two Viyella shirts that had been made for her by the landlady’s cousin; they were not a very good fit, but perfectly serviceable under a cardigan. Her sponge bag was rather a disgrace. Again, it had belonged to Father and she had the distinct impression that it was not waterproof; she decided to wrap her flannel and toothbrush in newspaper before putting them into it, She would not take many books as, doubtless, the Cazalet family would possess a delightful quantity and she was sure that they would let her borrow from them. Her other pair of shoes, brown lace-ups, needed soling, she could see a hole in one of them, and they had worn dreadfully thin. How on earth was she to get all this into one case? She began cramming things in, first laying the foulard over the bottom in the hope that it would not then be utterly crushed, and then stuffing everything on top. It was soon overflowing, and she could not get it shut. She did not like to ask Mrs Timpson to come and help her as there had been a distinct atmosphere ever since she had announced that she was going away for a while. Mrs Timpson seemed to feel that she should have been given more notice, which was nonsense, really, since she would still be paying for the room. It became clear that the case would only be shut if she did not take her cardigan. Or she could wear it? But she did tend to perspire rather and she must, of course, travel in her better coat, which was quite thick. There was nothing for it: she would have to take two cases, and this, she feared, would mean a cab, which, from Stoke Newington to Charing Cross might easily come to two pounds. Or even more. Well, she had summoned up all her courage and cashed a cheque that morning for ten pounds. ‘I am going on a journey,’ she had explained to the cashier before he could say too much. She was on her knees trying to pull the other case out from under her bed. It seemed intractably heavy, and she remembered that it was full of papers, photographs, and a few pieces of china that she had kept from home: a teapot with cowslips on it and a pair of fruit plates, with grapes and cherries in the centre and a dark blue and gold rim. All these things would have to go into the chest of drawers and this, she knew, meant that they were not safe from Mrs Timpson’s prying eyes. Well, she would take Eustace’s letters – they must remain private – and the rest would have to take pot luck. Going on a journey! How extremely fortunate she was! And the invitation had come at the end of a long summer when she had to admit that she had become a little tired of her own company. It was not so much the days when she was quite able to interest herself in galleries, but the evenings, when her eyes were tired and she could not always read as much as she would have liked. A little conversation would have been pleasant then, if there had been anybody to converse with.