The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Edward did not reply. They were driving down Whitehall, and lorries loaded with sandbags were being directed by police into Downing Street and the doors of the government offices. There was not much other traffic.

  ‘And so,’ Diana continued – she felt both nettled and reckless – ‘of course he gave me nothing after Fergus. Or Jamie.’ This is idiotic, she thought. Why am I saying such unattractive, unimportant stupid things? She began to feel frightened. ‘Edward—’

  ‘Since you brought the subject up,’ he said, ‘it seems rather funny to me that you should make such a fuss about Villy having a child while we are going to bed together, when you did exactly the same thing yourself.’

  ‘I never told you that I didn’t ever go to bed with Angus! I told you that I didn’t want to! And, anyway, it was different about Jamie.’

  He did not want to pursue the difference. ‘Well, come to that, I can’t remember ever telling you that I never went to bed with Villy. I didn’t talk about it because—’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because it simply isn’t the kind of thing one talks about.’

  ‘You mean, it might be embarrassing?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said doggedly, ‘it certainly might.’

  Outside Waterloo Station there was a queue of buses all full of children waiting to get into the station. As they drew alongside one of them they could hear the shrill voices in a kind of singing shout: ‘Jeepers creepers! Where d’yer get those peepers? Jeepers creepers, where d’yer get those eyes!’ over and over again.

  ‘Poor little beggars,’ Edward said. ‘Some of them must be going to the country for the first time in their lives.’

  This touched her: she put a hand on his knee. ‘Darling! I don’t know what came over me! I’ve been feeling so blue. And it’s the end of our lovely time. I suppose I’m terrified that you’ll be sent away somewhere and I’ll never see you. It’s ridiculous to quarrel when everything’s so awful, anyway.’

  ‘Darling! Here – have my hank. You know I can’t bear you to cry. Of course we won’t quarrel. And I promise you one thing.’

  She took her nose out of the voluptuous handkerchief that smelled so deliciously of Lebanon cedar. ‘What?’

  ‘Whatever I do I’ll find a way of seeing you. Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.’

  She blew and then powdered her nose.

  ‘Keep the handkerchief,’ he said.

  ‘Really you encourage me to blub,’ she said; she felt lightheaded as people sometimes do after a near accident. ‘You always tell me to keep your splendid handkerchiefs. I have quite a serious collection.’

  ‘Have you, sweetie? Well, I like you having them.’

  They were all right after that, discussed how they could meet. Diana had found a girl in the village who would look after Jamie for a day sometimes: if he telephoned and got Isla, he would pretend to be an old friend of her father’s who, since widowed, lived in the Isle of Man with a gigantic clockwork railway apparatus which he played with from morning till night. ‘Well, not too old a friend,’ Diana said. ‘Daddy’s seventy-two, and you wouldn’t sound like a contemporary of his. You’d better be the son of his oldest friend.’ Edward said he could sound old if he tried, but when challenged to try sounded as Diana said, exactly like someone of forty-two, which he was. Why would the son keep ringing her up? They invented an ingenious but totally unconvincing fantasy about that, and everything became far more light-hearted. ‘And, of course, we could write to each other,’ Diana eventually said, but Edward made a face, and said writing was not much in his line.

  ‘I did so many lines at school’, he said, ‘that I invented a system of tying ten pens together, not in a bunch but in a string, so that I could write ten at once. But they caught me and I had to write more than ever.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you at school.’

  ‘Nor can I. I loathed every minute of it. Never out of hot water.’

  They parted at the gate of Plum Cottage. A hurried embrace in the car.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ he said.

  ‘And you. God bless,’ she added, she was feeling tearful again, but determined not to cry.

  When she was out of the car and had walked round it to the gate, she turned, and he blew her a kiss. This made her want to rush back to the car, but she smiled as brightly as she could, waved, and walked up the brick path. She heard him start the engine and go, and stood listening until she could no longer hear the car. ‘I am in love with him,’ she said to herself. ‘In love. With him.’ It could happen to anyone, but once it did, they had no choice.

  That Saturday evening, all the grown-ups from Pear Tree Cottage – that is to say, Villy and Edward (only he was late), Sybil and Hugh, Jessica and Raymond, and Lady Rydal dined at Home Place, as the Brig had decreed that they should. Only Miss Milliment was left there to dine with the older children, some of whom had been swapped from Home Place for the meal. By the time Edward arrived, the adult party were starting upon their roast veal, with Mrs Cripps’s delicious forcemeat balls and paper thin slices of lemon, mashed potatoes and french beans. They were fifteen round the long table that had had its fourth leaf put in for the occasion, and Eileen had got Bertha to help hand the vegetables. Sid, who realised that she was the only outsider – a situation in which on different levels she often found herself – looked round at them with an affection that apart from her usual irony had something of awe. Everybody had worked hard all day in preparation for war, but now they all looked – and talked and behaved – as though it was just another ordinary evening. As they were either talking or eating or both, she could rove round the dark polished table. The Brig was telling old Lady Rydal some story about India – frequently interrupted by her: both considered themselves to be experts on that subject; he on the strength of a three months’ visit with his wife in the twenties, she for the reason that she had been born there, ‘a baby in the Mutiny’. ‘My ayah carried me out into the garden and hid me in a gardener’s hut for two days and thereby saved my life. So you see, Mr Cazalet, I cannot consider all Indians to be unreliable, although I know that that is a view that those less well informed might take. And’, she added to put the finishing touch to this munificence, ‘I cannot believe that the Indian nature has changed. There was a great deal of loyalty that was most touching – my father, whose experience was unrivalled, always said that he would trust his sepoys as he would his own brother.’

  This both made Jessica and Villy exchange a glance of suppressed amusement – only they knew that Lady Rydal’s father had quarrelled so fiercely with his brother that they were not on speaking terms for at least forty years – and gave the Brig the opening he needed: armed with the slightest coincidence he could breach a small gap in anyone’s conversation, and now he was in with how interesting that she should mention sepoys, because a remarkable man he had met on the boat – extraordinary thing – both going over and coming back had said … Sid moved on to the great-aunts, who sat side by side in their bottle green and maroon crêpe-de-Chine long-sleeved dresses placidly sorting out the food on their plates: Dolly regarded forcemeat as indigestible, and Flo could not bear fat, while each deplored the other’s fussiness. ‘In the last war we were grateful for anything,’ Flo was saying, and Dolly retorting, ‘I have not the slightest recollection of you being grateful for anything: even when Father gave you that nice holiday in Broadstairs after you had to leave the hospital you weren’t grateful. Flo was useless as a nurse, because she simply could not stand the sight of blood,’ she remarked rather more loudly to anyone who might be listening. ‘She ended up with other VADs having to look after her which, of course, was not at all what the doctor ordered …’

  Sybil, wearing a rather shapeless crêpe dress – she had put on weight since having Wills – was telling the Duchy how worried she was about him.

  ‘It’s only a phase,’ the Duchy said placidly. ‘Edward used to spit whenever he lost his temper as a little boy. He used to have the most ungovernable rage
s, and of course I worried about him. They all have tantrums when they’re babies.’ She sat, very straight, at the end of the table dressed as she always was, in her blue silk shirt with the sapphire and mother-of-pearl cross slung upon her discreet bosom – breasts, Sid thought affectionately, would not figure in her anatomy or her language – her frank and unselfconscious gaze directed now at her daughter-in-law. Now she began to laugh, as she went on, ‘Edward was the naughtiest of the lot. When he was about ten, I suppose it was, he once picked every single daffodil in the garden, tied them in bunches with his sister’s hair ribbons, and sold them at the end of the drive. He had a notice that said “Help the Poor” on a board, and do you know who the poor were? Himself! We had stopped his pocket money for some other crime, and he wanted a special kind of spinning top!’ She took the tiny lace handkerchief from under the gold strap of her wrist-watch and wiped her eyes.

  ‘And did he get it?’

  ‘Oh, no, my dear. I made him put it all in the box on Sunday at church. And, of course, he got a spanking.’

  ‘You must be talking about me,’ Edward called from across the table. He had been listening to Jessica.

  ‘Yes, darling, I was.’

  ‘I was hopeless at school, too,’ Edward said. ‘I don’t know how you all put up with me.’

  How self-confident he must be to say that, Sid thought, but any further thoughts were interrupted by Jessica saying, ‘I wish you’d tell that to Christopher. He feels he is such a failure at school.’

  ‘He feels that because he is,’ Raymond said. ‘I’ve never known a boy muff so many opportunities.’

  ‘He is good at Latin,’ Jessica said at once.

  ‘He likes Latin. The test is whether a boy works at anything he doesn’t like.’

  ‘And natural history. He knows a lot about birds and things.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone works much at things that they don’t like,’ Villy remarked. ‘Look at Louise. I really think that all those years with Miss Milliment all she did was read plays and novels. She has the most rudimentary idea of maths and Latin. Or Greek.’

  ‘Does Miss Milliment teach them Greek?’ Rupert asked. ‘She is an amazing old thing, isn’t she? Who educated her, I wonder? She knows a hell of a lot about painting.’

  ‘I suspect she largely educated herself. But I expect you know, don’t you, Mummy?’ Villy turned to Lady Rydal, who looked at her in some surprise before she answered.

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. She came from a respectable family, and Lady Conway said she had been very good with her girls. Naturally, I didn’t enquire into her personal life.’

  ‘Well, I think whoever it is, it’s better for girls to be educated at home,’ Hugh said. ‘You hated your boarding school, didn’t you, Rach?’

  And Sid, at once directed towards Rachel, saw her flinch at the memory before she said, ‘I did, rather, but I expect it was very good for me.’ She was almost too tired to eat, Sid saw, and longed to say, ‘Darling, give up for the day – go to bed, and I’ll bring you anything you feel like on a tray,’ but it’s not my house, she thought, and she is not supposed to be my love, or anything near it, and I have no power at all. After that, she could observe and think of nothing but Rachel. She realised that the Duchy was bringing Zoë into the conversation, drawing attention to the centrepiece of roses on the table that apparently Zoë had done, but all the time she saw Rachel trying to eat what was on her plate – the family did not approve of people picking at their food, and the Duchy deplored waste. She saw Rachel cutting off a sliver of veal and putting it into her mouth and then, eventually, swallowing it, picking at the mashed potato with her fork, crumbling the piece of bread on her side plate and eating tiny pieces between sips of water. Rachel had not only had endless and arduous administrative problems in moving her Babies’ Hotel, she had borne the brunt of her parents’ conflict about it, although that part of it had been considerably worse last year when there had been no accommodation for them but the squash court. Practical considerations had not then, as now, impaired the Brig’s patriarchal generosity, but they had offended, and still to some extent did offend, the Duchy’s sense of what was sensible and proper. Rachel, who hated conflict, had had the unenviable task of carrying messages about all this between her parents, softening them en route from the arbitrary and sweeping plans of her father and the awkward, not to say unanswerable questions from her mother, which, as Sid could see, suited both parties: the Brig would brook no interference of his arrangements, and the Duchy would never actually oppose them; the presence of a daughter therefore enabled them to continue a bland relationship in public. But this, as so much else in her filial life, was at Rachel’s expense, and in this case, it was her charity that was at stake and so naturally she was even more driven and dutiful. What is to become of us? Sid thought, and could find no answer. At least Evie, her sister, was out of the way, safely ensconced in Bath, being the secretary for yet another musician she had fallen for – at least, that was what it had sounded like the last time she had telephoned. But what was she, Sid, to do when the war finally started? She could not simply continue teaching music in schools, surely? She should join some women’s service, but every time she thought of that, as she had been doing with increasing frequency in the last few weeks, she had also to think that this would mean leaving Rachel, completely and for an unknown amount of time, a prospect so chilling and awful as to paralyse her. So far she had been able to retreat from this dilemma because it still lay precariously in the future, a possibility, a last and uncertain resort, but since yesterday with the news that the Germans had invaded Poland, had knocked out the Polish air force and immobilised their railways, she knew that it was on the brink of not being the future any more. She ached to talk alone with Rachel, if she needs me, she thought, but Rachel did not acknowledge need in relation to herself of any kind, would only consider her – Sid’s – duty as earnestly and sincerely as she would her own. Anyway, tonight was out of the question. Tonight, at the Duchy’s instigation, they were to play the Pastoral Symphony, her beloved Toscanini’s performance, on her splendid new gramophone. ‘I think we need that kind of music tonight,’ she had said before dinner, the only allusion made by any of them to what lay in store. And after the Beethoven, Rachel would be utterly worn out, even supposing she stayed the course. She looked across the table now to catch Rachel’s eye, but she was talking to Villy, and as she looked away, it was Zoë’s eye that she caught, and Zoë gave her a small hesitant smile – almost as one outsider to another, Sid thought, as she returned it. She had used to evade Zoë, distrusting the extraordinarily pretty, but she thought vacuous face, but Zoë’s habitual expression had changed: it was as though before she had known everything she thought she needed to know, and now knew nothing. The effect was to make her mysteriously younger, which was odd, because Sid had thought that sorrow – and she had, after all, only recently lost her baby – made people look older. She had observed that the family treated her differently from a year ago; they seemed now to have accepted her, as, in a way, they have me, she thought, but, then, that is only because they don’t know my secret, and she looked at Zoë again, as the (bizarre, surely) notion that she, too, might have a secret occurred. What nonsense, she then thought, she simply looks a little lost because she has lost something, but at least her deprivation can be known and acknowledged – it is a respectable loss, however severe.

  They were on to the plum tart now, and Rupert, at the Duchy’s instigation, was telling his story of Tonks at the Slade. ‘He used to walk very slowly round the room, peering at each student’s work in silence, until he came across a particularly inept piece of work – done by one of the girls. He would stare at it, and the silence became so awful you could hear a pin drop. He would say, “Do you knit?” He was next to Villy and addressed the question to her, whereupon Villy who, of course, knew the story, instantly became the awestruck student and, with the perfect nervous giggle, agreed that she did. “Well, why don’t you
go home and do that?”’

  ‘How awful!’ Jessica cried. ‘Poor girl!’

  ‘He was a wonderful teacher, though,’ Rupert said. ‘He just couldn’t be bothered with people who were absolutely no good.’

  ‘He liked your work, though, didn’t he, Rupe?’ Zoë said.

  ‘Well, he didn’t ask me whether I could knit.’

  ‘Just as well, old boy,’ Edward said. ‘You’d make a rotten knitter.’

  Here Flo gave one high-pitched little scream of laughter, and choked, whereupon Dolly hit her, quite viciously, on the back, with the result that some plum tart shot out of her nose onto the table.

  ‘Edward, give her your handkerchief,’ Villy cried, as Flo stopped coughing and began to sneeze.

  Edward felt in his pockets. ‘Can’t seem to find it.’

  Raymond proffered his; Villy got up with a glass of water and ministered to Flo, whose face had suffused from mulberry to beetroot.

  ‘You’ll be lucky if you ever get your hanky back,’ Dolly remarked. ‘I’ve never known Flo return a hanky. In her entire life.’

  ‘At least I have some sense of humour,’ Flo returned between sneezes, ‘which is more than could be said for some.’

  Rachel caught Sid’s eye then and winked; to Sid it felt like a caress: she winked back.

  At dinner, or rather supper, in Pear Tree Cottage, however, the war – beside much else – was discussed with varying degrees of anxiety and cheerful abandon. In this last camp were Teddy, Simon, Nora, Lydia and Neville (Lydia and Neville had wheedled themselves dinner in the dining room on the twofold grounds that it would be less trouble for the servants, and that they hadn’t had a treat for weeks). Their presence was deeply resented by Polly and Clary who had only recently been promoted to supper downstairs and that not always. ‘They haven’t got a shred of justice in their bodies,’ Clary had said earlier of her father and Aunt Villy. Christopher and Polly were united in their disapproval and dread of war; Louise was poised uncertainly between all of them: disapproval of war was one thing, having one’s career utterly wrecked was another; on the other hand, it was all being, or feeling as though it was going to be, terribly exciting. Miss Milliment, who had earlier sensed that Villy would be relieved if she did not seem to expect to go out to dinner with the rest of the family and had said how much she should like to have supper with the children, preserved an interested equanimity. She sat now in her nigger brown stockinette skirt and cardigan – which she had that morning discovered right at the back of her wardrobe; she could not have worn it for at least two years, and it had been casually attacked by moth, but fortunately only in places that did not show very much – her small grey eyes glinting with amusement behind her steel-rimmed spectacles.