‘Jeepers!’ she said. ‘I’ve given my mother a sick headache, dinner was delayed because of all the telephone calls, I’m not fit to be allowed out because I’m so selfish and irresponsible, and he’s a good mind to stop my allowance for the whole term.’
‘I thought you were—’
‘Crying? Oh, I had to sound like that. It’s the only way to stop him. Fathers! Do you have trouble with yours?’
‘Not – well, sometimes.’
‘I can’t wait to be grown up,’ Stella said as they climbed the stairs to their attic.
‘Oh, I absolutely agree with you there!’
The first bond between them. It was even better when Louise discovered that Stella, unlike all the others, had no wish to be a deb – ‘I hardly know what they are!’ she said with entrancing scorn – but wanted to be something, although she hadn’t decided exactly what, which led the way into Louise’s ambitions about the theatre and the impending audition. Stella was pleasingly impressed. ‘You can practise on me,’ she said. ‘I simply adore being acted to or played to – or anything like that.’
‘In fact, I might join you at the acting school,’ she said much later. ‘I think I’d rather enjoy that.’ This shocked Louise, who felt that this was an irreverent approach to her sacred art.
‘You can’t just decide to act,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? Because it’s not just a job, it’s more of a calling. I mean, you have to be some good at it in the first place.’
‘Like you, you mean?’
‘I never said I was.’
‘But you think you are. Perhaps you just want to be famous. I don’t care about that. I would do it just to find out what it was like. If you’re interested in things, it doesn’t matter too much if you turn out to be no good at them. It’s doing it that’s fun.’
‘Oh.’
‘You don’t agree with me!’
‘I just haven’t thought about it like that.’
They were to have many conversations of that kind during the term, which was the coldest, the Miss Rennishaws said, that they could remember. Everybody had hot-water bottles and wore bedsocks, and shut their window at night after the taller Miss Rennishaw had been round to say good night to them. She believed in fresh air of any temperature. There was a coal fire in their sitting room, which meant that half a dozen of them could get warm at a time. There were plentiful meals in spite of the rationing that had begun before the term started. Recipes were being changed. To begin with, it didn’t seem to make much difference: their four ounces of butter was doled out to them on individual saucers, but bacon and sugar was pooled: cooking was done with margarine and lard. Meat was not rationed until the end of the term, but it had become more expensive, and they were taught to make more stews and pies and to use offal, the latter being generally unpopular. Louise stopped going to confession, but she felt too nervous of Miss Rennishaw’s disapproval if she gave up church as well, so she went. Stella came the first Sunday with her, and stood and sat and knelt, but was mute. ‘I don’t know the words,’ she said, when Louise asked her afterwards why she hadn’t joined in. ‘I shan’t come again, anyway,’ she added. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like.’
‘Don’t your family ever go?’
‘Never.’ She answered so repressively that Louise dropped the subject.
Stella’s curiosity seemed to embrace everything, and to be insatiable. It led her to trespassing: ‘Let’s see where this path goes to’; to examining the contents of people’s chests of drawers when they were housemaids together (‘Barbara Carstairs has a box with false eyelashes in it – black – not at all like her sandy ones, and Sonia Shillingsworth has a photograph of someone in her underclothes drawer that definitely isn’t her brother,’ whereupon Louise, although shocked, would fall into the trap of asking, ‘How do you know?’ ‘She hasn’t got one: I asked her,’). It led her to dipping her fingers into jars and tins to taste the contents, to experimenting with pots and bottles of cold cream and astringent lotions – even lipsticks were tried and then hastily rubbed off. At the same time Louise discovered that she could be intensely and unexpectedly private and resented questions of any kind. She was very funny: in a few weeks she could imitate anyone in the school, not only their voices but everything else about them. But she was also a wonderful audience: weeping at Louise’s Juliet, and laughing until the tears ran down her face at her sketch of a dancing-class teacher. ‘Angelic Louise! Oh, I love people who make me laugh. And cry. You’re the only person here who could do that.’ She was wonderfully sympathetic about Louise’s parents being so uninterested in her career. ‘Although’, she said, ‘it can be worse if they have definite ideas for one.’
‘Do your parents have ideas for you?’
‘Do they! Sometimes my mother wants me to go to university so that I can thereafter be a teacher or work in a library or something. But my father simply wants me to make a good, suitable marriage. And then sometimes it’s the other way round. They have rows about it and then they make up and blame it all on me.’
‘What about your brother?’
‘There was never any question about him. Peter’s always been going to be a musician. As soon as he left school he went to the Academy. The only thing is, he’ll get called up before he’s finished his training. He got deferred to finish his first year because he had a double scholarship. So he’ll only have one more term.’
‘Perhaps the war will be over before then. Nothing much seems to happen.’
‘It will.’
‘How on earth do you know, Stella?’
‘I just do. My father says Hitler’s become unbelievably powerful – and he’s insane.’
Louise noticed that many conversations ended with Stella quoting her father as though there was nothing more to be said. Sometimes, as now, she found this irritating. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem as though much is going to happen. I mean, all our evacuees have gone back to London and there haven’t been any of the air raids we were told would be so frightening. And my father says that with every month that goes by, we’re getting more aeroplanes and ships and everything, which makes it less and less likely that the Germans would dare to attack us. So honestly, it is possible, Stella, that your father may be wrong.’
But Stella’s face – her whole body – implied the utter impossibility of this. Louise dropped the subject. By now, they loved one another enough to disagree, to disapprove, to snub each other, but they never actually quarrelled.
‘I’m so lucky you were here!’ Stella would say. Sometimes this exclamation would be followed by a list of Louise’s attributes: she used her mind, she’d read things, she was determined upon a career, she was ‘a serious person’, until Louise, blushing with pleasure at being so appreciated, would disclaim the virtues, aware all the time that she neither read nor thought enough to be so extolled, and she would counter-attack with Stella’s talents, which seemed the greater to her because they were so lightly borne (Stella could not only play anything she heard by ear but had perfect pitch; she also turned out to be fluent in both French and German and to have a photographic memory – she could read a recipe once and remember every detail of it). Sometimes it was how lucky it was that they had met, and Stella proceeded to outline the boringness of the other girls: one could see them all, she said, and proceeded to enact the seven ages of the deb. ‘All horsy to begin with, with shining healthy pink faces and Harris tweed jackets talking about cubbing and fetlocks, and then simpering away in tulle and white net with little pearl necklaces and tight perms, and then all soppy and radiant in creasy white satin being married, and then in cashmere with larger pearls holding some ghastly baby – oh, I left out being presented with those idiotic white feathers in their hair and long white gloves – and then looking much fatter in a suit with a complicated hat at their child’s speech day, and then looking completely passé in beige lace at their daughter’s coming-out dance …’ Her caricatures of all these phases were ac
companied by wonderfully comic expressions, and her hands delineated the appropriate clothes until Louise was helpless with laughter.
‘Henrietta’s not so bad,’ she would say eventually.
‘She is! She sleeps on her back so that her face will stay smooth when she’s old.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Mary Taylor told me, because she’s always having nightmares and Mary has to wake her up.’
‘Well, there are the Seraphic Twins.’ Angelica and Caroline Redfern were identical: ash blonde with velvet brown eyes and amazingly long, elegant legs, and widely regarded as the height of glamour.
‘Oh, them! It’s only there being two of them that impresses people. You know, like pairs of things being more valuable than one of them from the collecting point of view. Two minds without a single thought is more like it.’
Louise, after she had laughed, said she thought Stella was in danger of being priggish. ‘I mean, we aren’t actually that much more marvellous.’
‘I never said we were. But we make the most – well, more – of ourselves. We want to be more.’
Somehow, Stella always had the last word. As, Louise recognised, Nora had also often done. Perhaps I am a weak character, she thought incredulously. Surely not! All the same she knew that Stella was her best friend, and as she, unlike Stella, had never been to schools, boarding or otherwise, this was a new and exciting experience, and the only sad thing to dread was that after this last term they would be parted, as Stella was staying on to complete her course. ‘Although I might not,’ she said. ‘You never know. I loathe cooking, and I’m certainly never going to do any housework, and what’s the use of me learning how to interview servants when soon there won’t be any?’
‘Stella, don’t be so mad! There’ll always be servants.’
‘There won’t. They’ll go and do war work and then they won’t want to come back. Would you?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Now you’re relying on the old class structure.’
‘So what? That’s what we’ve got.’ But here she had hit on a new and hitherto entirely concealed vein in her friend, as Stella launched into her political views. What did Louise think class structure depended upon? Educating people so badly that they could only do the dull and menial jobs, or relying upon them having some vocation, like nursing, where they wanted to do whatever it was so badly that they would put up with being very poorly paid. There was nothing like making sure people were half educated and not paying them properly to keep them in a place where nobody else wanted to be, she finished. They were lying head to tail on Louise’s bed, eating Walnut Whips and wrapped in their eiderdowns, and for a moment or two they were both silent, although the storm outside, a shrieking wind and rain slamming against the windows, felt to Louise like her own thoughts, chaotic and noisy – and aghast.
Then Stella said, ‘You’ve never thought about these things, have you?’
‘No, not in the way you put it.’
‘Your family don’t talk about things like that?’
‘Well, not much.’ She thought of her father inveighing against people who were too lazy to work for their money. ‘My father told me once that he drove a bus in the General Strike.’
But Stella simply laughed, and retorted, There you are then. Conservative to the bone.’
‘And my mother has done a lot of work for the Red Cross. And charities and things.’
‘Charity is just another way of keeping people in their place.’
Louise was silenced. Everything that Stella said amazed her; she had no experience, no knowledge, no machinery of thought to contest, to deny or even to contribute to these ideas. Much later, after they had cleaned their teeth and Miss Rennishaw had been to say good night and told them that a tree had fallen down across the drive, she said, ‘But who will do it if you don’t want to and you don’t think anyone else will?’
And Stella, who knew at once that she was talking about housework, said, I don’t know. I should think most of it won’t get done. Most of it is unnecessary – look at all the pointless polishing we do.’
This answer did not seem entirely satisfactory, but she was too unsure about everything to argue. Because it was disturbing (and exciting), and she knew nothing compared to Stella, she decided to find but more, only she felt it was going to be quite difficult to choose anyone else to ask.
They were both going home for the same weekend, and then on the Friday before it, her mother rang Louise. ‘I’m afraid this weekend will have to be put off, Louise. Grania has suddenly become not at all well, and I have to take her to a nursing home.’
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘As I said, she’s not at all well. She’s been very forgetful lately, and now she doesn’t seem to know what is going on at all, and the servants can’t manage her. So I’m taking her to a very nice place near Tunbridge Wells where I’m told the nursing is good and she will be properly cared for. And of course Daddy’s away – he never seems to get any leave – so could we make it next weekend instead?’
‘But I’d be perfectly all right at home by myself. And it won’t take you more than one day, will it?’
‘I’m afraid it will, because I’ve got to go to Frensham to collect her from Aunt Jessica and then take her to the home, and then go and shut up her house in London – deal with poor Bryant who is practically having a nervous breakdown. Grania’s been ordering enormous meals for dinner parties and then not asking anyone because, of course, she doesn’t really know anybody any more and then she gets very distressed and thinks it’s all poor Bryant’s fault.’
‘Goodness! She’s sort of gone off her head!’
But her mother repeated repressively: ‘She’s simply become very confused.’
When she told Stella, Stella said, ‘Well, I’ll have to ask, of course, but perhaps you could come and stay with me.’
Which, after what they both considered was a lot of fuss, is what happened. Stella’s mother said yes, and then Miss Rennishaw said that Louise’s mother must give her consent, and then Louise’s mother wanted Mrs Rose’s telephone number … ‘What on earth for?’ Louise cried. ‘It’s really awful the way they treat us, as though we were babies.’
‘I entirely agree with you. Particularly when, if we were boys, in a year’s time we’d be considered old enough to go to France and die for our country. Well, I would, anyway.’ Stella at eighteen was a year older than Louise.
‘Do your family talk about politics a lot?’ she asked in the train.
‘They talk about everything a lot. They talk so much that they hardly have time to hear what each other says, and then they accuse each other of never listening to anyone else. Don’t look so worried. We’ll do things on our own.’
The Roses lived in a large, dark mansion flat in St John’s Wood. It was on the third floor and was reached by a lift, like a cage, that made mysterious noises when in motion. The front door had an iron grille in front of stained glass. It was opened by a small squat woman who looked, Louise thought, as though she was sick and tired of being so tired. She had black eyes with paler dark circles under them and a mouth that seemed compressed with tragic resignation. When she saw Stella, she smiled and patted her effusively, before kissing her. ‘This is my aunt Anna,’ Stella said. ‘This is my friend Louise Cazalet.’
‘The other way round, Stella. How many times have I told you that you tell the older person to whom they are being introduced?’ Stella’s mother emerged out of the gloomy passage that seemed to stretch for ever in front of them.
‘But a child,’ Aunt Anna murmured and, nodding to Louise, she pushed past Stella’s mother and disappeared.
‘How do you do, Louise? I am so glad that you can keep my girl company this weekend. Take Louise to her room, Stella. Lunch will be in a quarter of an hour and Papa is coming back for it.’
‘That means “don’t you dare be late”,’ Stella murmured. ‘Have you noticed how they hardly ever say simply what
they mean?’
All the same she was ready in no time and hanging about in Louise’s doorway.
‘Is your mother French?’
‘Good Lord, no. Viennese.’
‘She’s fantastically beautiful.’
‘I know. Come on. Papa’s back – I heard the front door.’
She led the way to a large sitting room very full of fat, upholstered chairs and sofas, glass-fronted bookcases, and a grand piano. One whole side of the room was adorned with huge gilded mirrors in front of which, on a pair of marble-topped tables, were plaster busts of Beethoven and somebody she didn’t recognise. The tall windows on the opposite wall were partly obscured by dark velvet curtains that were looped back with thick silk tasselled rope to reveal inner curtains of elaborate white lace. A coal fire burned in the grate, glowing distantly in the crowded twilight. The room was very hot. Stella took her by the elbow and guided her through the furniture to the far end where Mrs Rose stood beside her much shorter husband.
‘This is Louise, Papa.’
As he shook hands with her he remarked, ‘When you introduce people, Stella, you should use their full name. Your friend is not a housemaid.’
‘Sometimes she is. It’s one of the things we have to do at school.’
‘Ah ha!’ It came out like a snort. ‘Peter is late. Why?’
‘He has a rehearsal, Otto. He said not to wait.’
‘We must, of course, obey him. Come, Miss Louise, and have some lunch.’
He led the way through the room to another door beside the one they had come in from, which proved to lead to a smaller room where a table was elaborately laid: a white cloth, silver, rather heavy, old-fashioned-looking china and tall, straight-backed chairs with velvet seats. This room was curtained in the same manner, but lit by a large chandelier with parchment half-shades on each candle bulb. Stella’s parents sat at each end of the table and Louise and Stella were placed each side of her father. After a moment, Aunt Anna appeared, followed by a little maid who seemed almost overpowered by the enormous soup tureen she carried on a tray which she set before Mrs Rose, who proceeded to ladle it into plates that were set in a pile before her. Louise was not used to soup. It smelled strong but inviting, and contained dumplings bobbing about in the broth and she was not sure how to eat them.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 62
