The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Then she put, ‘But of course you would know all that’ so that he wouldn’t be hurt at her thinking he didn’t know things. Then she read the letter through. It seemed to her very dull. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very interesting letter. I see what you mean about writing to somebody for the first time. You don’t quite know how well you know them on paper.

  ‘I can’t really imagine life in a battleship. Uncle Rupert used to feel seasick for the first two days. It must be awful to have to fight feeling seasick, but I remember my governess saying that Nelson often felt like that, although I cannot imagine why that should be a comfort to you. But I hope it’s not too bad. Anyway, love from Louise.’ Then she thought again and wrote underneath: ‘P.S. I wasn’t really brave when the bomb fell. I just sat still because I didn’t know what else to do. Of course I’m glad you like my appearance.’ Then she put ‘Dear Mike’. The Mike made ‘dear’ OK, she thought. She wrote his name, and the name of his ship, c/o GPO. It seemed a funny address, but that is what he had put on the paper, so it must be all right.

  The First Night came – and went. Stella sent her a telegram which was lovely of her, because all the others got telegrams from their family except for her. ‘The house’ as she had learned to call it, was only half full, but that didn’t matter to her: they were a real live audience who had paid to come, and that was the point. Jay kissed her again in the wings while she was waiting to go on. ‘There, my honey,’ he said, ‘a stirrup cup of affection or lust – take your choice.’ Roy was beautifully reliable and some of the time she pretended he was Jay which made him feel more interesting. She remembered what she’d thought about Jane’s performance as Katherina, and put the sadness in a bit. It was lovely curtsying in the sweeping red velvet when she took her curtain call. Afterwards Chris came round and gave her a smacking kiss on each cheek and pressed her to his hard round tummy and said, ‘That’s my girl! You did well, Louise. You’ll do better, but you did well.’

  They all went home on the last bus, and then sat round the kitchen table going over all the details of their performances, and finally fell into their beds. The next morning, Louise found brownish greasepaint on her pillow which made her wonder whether Trex was the best thing.

  They played four evenings and four matinées to schools – the latter were rather a noisy audience, but at least they filled up the house – whereas the evenings, for the general public, were not very well attended. The local paper reviewed the scenes, and every single person in them was mentioned. The piece was not signed, and although it was clear that Chris knew who had written it, he refused to tell them anything except that it had not been him. Still, to read ‘Louise Cazalet gave us two well-contrasted performances as Katherina and Anne’ was rather exciting. She bought two copies, one to send home and one to keep in a scrapbook together with the programme.

  As soon as the Shakespeare week was over, the next two plays were announced by Chris. They were to do Hay Fever and Night Must Fall. The reason that he announced both plays was that even with the girls doubling on the female parts there were not enough parts for all of them to be in both plays. Louise, to her disappointment, was cast as Sorrel in Hay Fever, the ingénue and, she thought, the dullest part, and not cast at all in Night Must Fall. Hay Fever was to be performed at Christmas and, after it, Chris said that she might go home for a couple of weeks if she liked. She did not want to go, had a fear that they might not let her come back if she did. But then she got another letter from Mike – his third – saying that he was getting a week’s leave while his ship was undergoing a refit and was there the slightest possibility that she could spend at least some of it with him? If not, he would try to get down for a night to Devon to see her.

  Because communications are so difficult [he wrote], I am brazenly proposing that you should meet me at Markham Square on Friday 10 January. I have looked up trains from Exford, and find that you could arrive with luck about three. If you can’t make it, write to me, and then when I get to London, I’ll ring you up to see whether any other plan is possible. Do try, darling little Louise – I so long to see you. You would be the best antidote to my present life that I can think of. The High Seas are extraordinarily wet: I feel amazingly privileged when at last there is time to fall upon my bunk, and only have the condensation dripping quietly onto my nose. However, we make the odd killing … No more of that. One of my jobs is to censor the men’s letters, so I am becoming quite an authority on domestic and marital situations. I sometimes wonder whether you have fallen madly in love with some handsome young actor, and cannot help hoping that you haven’t …

  She wrote back saying that she would come to Markham Square on that Friday and that she could be away for a week. The bit about his wondering whether she was in love she did not answer, because she didn’t know what she felt – either about him, or about Jay, who had taken to coming into their room when Griselda was not there, lying on the bed beside her and reading poetry to her. She enjoyed this and when the poetry subsided into his kissing her and stroking and kissing her breasts she discovered a sort of enjoyment in that too, but not of the kind that she had expected. She had thought that by the time somebody kissed you, you were certainly, surely, in love with them. But the blissful rhapsody that she had so often read about escaped her. She liked Jay – was a little afraid of him, of his soft, satirical voice, his sophisticated vocabulary, his pale, appraising eyes. But he could be very gentle with her, and when she was not afraid, the bottom of her spine seemed to unfurl as though it was not rigid at all; it seemed to have small, hitherto unknown fronds attached to it. But her body did not seem to connect with any of the rest of her. She could shut her eyes and Jay became anybody, any fingers, hands, mouth. ‘Do you love me, then?’ she asked one evening.

  There was a pause. She was lying on her back, and he propped himself on his elbows to look down on her. ‘That, my dear girl, is a ridiculous question. How would you like it if I asked you that?’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t. At least you don’t pretend. You’re not full of all that romantic sentimental nonsense. I find you attractive, which I expect you’ve noticed by now. If you weren’t such a confirmed and utter little virgin I’d have you.’

  ‘Have me?’

  ‘Fuck you. But I have a feeling’, he added after waiting for a reply, ‘that this would either horrify you, or produce a sonorous response that wouldn’t suit me. So I don’t try.’ He picked up Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and continued to read:

  ‘Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her feet in the heather,

  Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.

  It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,

  All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.’

  and so on until the last verse:

  ‘It’s no go, my honey love, it’s no go, my poppet,

  Work your hands from day to day, the wind will blow the profit.

  The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,

  But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’

  Without saying anything, he riffled through the book and went on:

  ‘I have a handsome profile

  I’ve been to a great public school

  I’ve a little money invested

  Then why do I feel such a fool

  As if I owned a world that had had its day?

  ‘You certainly have good reason

  For feeling as you do

  No wonder you are anxious

  Because it’s perfectly true

  You own a world that has had its day.’

  He shut the book and looked at her again.

  ‘You see? If you want to know what’s going on in the world, read the contemporary poets. They know.’

  ‘Were those poems by the same person?’

  ‘No. The first was by Louis MacNeice, and the second by W. H. Auden. Both people you shoul
d have heard of, but I don’t suppose you have.’

  She shook her head, so disconsolately that he stroked it.

  ‘Cheer up. Here’s something to cheer you up.’

  Then he read in a voice rather like the one he had used for the parrot story:

  ‘Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath

  When behind her she heard a meaning laugh

  And to her amazement she discovered

  A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.

  ‘Do you soap your pretty breasts in the bath? Your pretty dukkys, as Henry VIII used to call them?’

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if I did,’ she said. ‘There isn’t room in this bathroom for a cupboard.’ The things that he knew fascinated her. ‘I wish I knew more,’ she said. ‘The world seems to be full of things I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll make you a list of poets if you like. That would make a respectable start.’

  He did. But sometimes she didn’t see him alone for days. This was partly because he spent time with Ernestine, the oldest girl there, whom none of the other girls liked but whom everyone was slightly afraid of. Ernestine had a room to herself on the ground floor. It had a fireplace in which she had a coal fire which meant she had the only warm room. She possessed a wardrobe of glamorous clothes, and painted her long finger nails with white varnish. She was small, with beautiful legs and a good figure, but her face looked much older than the twenty-five that she claimed to be. She wore her long dark brown hair in a kind of sausage fringe across her forehead, and the rest of it hanging down her back, and her long thin mouth was always painted with a cyclamen lipstick. She had a loud, grating voice which was largely used to jeer at things: society, the class system, the English – she said she was half French – the rich, anybody whose work did not involve the arts, virginity which she described variously as prissy and craven. She had lived in Chelsea before, and said it was the only civilised haven in the great inhibited, class-ridden tract that made up the rest of London. She had very little talent, but was convinced of her potential greatness. Chris allowed her a lot of leeway; some people thought he actually sucked up to her, and certainly he gave her privileges, like the room, which the others did not get. She was always talking about her lovers – notably one Torsten, a Norwegian, whom she said was the best she had ever had. People listened politely when they had to, chiefly at meals, but avoided her when possible. It was thought that she was paying more than anyone else to be there, and that Chris needed the money. She had clearly decided that Jay was the only man there worth her attention, and made it plain to Louise that she resented her. Somehow she had got wind of the letters from HM Ships – being on the ground floor she could always go through the letters before anyone else – and sneered a good deal at Louise about her sailor man. ‘They say all the nice girls love a sailor, but all I can say is that I’m not a nice girl, thank God. Louise must be a very nice girl, don’t you think?’ this to Jay.

  ‘Absolutely charming,’ he answered promptly with such a straight face that Louise felt he was on her side.

  The evening before Louise was to go, Ernestine suddenly invited her to her room. She had learned that Louise was going away for a week. ‘I might have something for you.’

  Unable to think of any decent way of getting out of this, Louise joined her after the customary roast meat and cabbage.

  Ernestine offered her one of her black Balkan Sobranies and a glass of wine. Louise was seated on the end of her orange divan, while Ernestine found glasses and a corkscrew.

  ‘Are you going home to your family?’ she asked, when she had poured a glass and handed it over.

  ‘No.’ Louise found it difficult to lie, and also a part of her wanted to assert herself before Ernestine who thought the rest of them such a pack of children. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m going to see my sailor as you call him. He’s got a week’s leave and it happens to fit in.’

  ‘Good for you!’ She seemed genuinely admiring. ‘I rather thought that that might be what you were up to.’ She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to you both!’ When she wasn’t jeering, her husky low voice was rather pleasant. ‘He’s not a sailor all the time, is he?’

  ‘Oh no. He’s a painter.’

  ‘An art student. Oh my!’

  ‘Not a student. A proper painter. He does portraits.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Michael Hadleigh.’

  ‘Michael Hadleigh? So you have a famous lover!’

  ‘He’s not exactly my lover.’ She felt herself beginning to blush and took a large swig of the wine. ‘I mean, I just know him – that’s all.’

  Ernestine leaned towards her and filled up her glass. ‘Well, it sounds as though he wants to know you better. You don’t expect to spend a week with him holding hands, do you?’

  ‘N-no.’ That sounded idiotic to her. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well then, my dear, perhaps you need a little advice.’ She got up and went to a chest of drawers, returning with what looked like a tube of toothpaste. ‘A precaution,’ she said, handing it to her.

  Louise looked at it. ‘Volpar Gel,’ she read. ‘What’s it for?’

  Ernestine rolled her eyes. ‘My God! I can’t believe it! To stop you getting pregnant, you poor little innocent. Of course, later on, you’ll be needing a Dutch cap.’

  Louise had a sudden vision of herself wearing one of those little white caps with stiff wings on them that occurred in Dutch pictures, and spooning jelly straight from the tube into her mouth. It seemed fantastic and silly and how on earth it would stop one having a baby she couldn’t imagine. She finished her second glass of wine while she considered this.

  ‘I am certainly not thinking of having a baby,’ she said. She said it as though she had considered the matter and decided – calmly, of course – against. I should like to go now, she thought, but Ernestine, as though she had divined this, lit two cigarettes and handed her one. The gold tip was smudged with cyclamen lipstick, and Louise did not want it, but she felt it would be rude to refuse.

  ‘Of course you aren’t. I’m only trying to help. I don’t suppose “Mummy” has told you much, has she? Anyway, you just go to any chemist and ask for a tube, and you’ll get it. The other thing I wondered was whether you would like to borrow some less schoolgirly underwear. Torsten gave me a couple of nightdresses that he said gave him a kick. I’ll show you.’

  One was black chiffon, and the other of fuchsia-coloured satin trimmed with black lace.

  She really meant to be kind, Louise thought, and decided that the easiest thing to do would be to accept one of them. She need never wear it, and Ernestine wouldn’t know.

  ‘It’s awfully kind of you—’ she began.

  ‘Balls! Always come to Auntie Ernestine when you want any advice about sex. You’d better take the tube as well. I don’t see you getting up the nerve to go into a chemist to ask for it.’

  Soon after this Louise made her escape. She felt uncomfortably that although she didn’t really like Ernestine much, she seemed to have meant well. She had also opened up vistas of what the week before her might hold that made her almost – but not quite – wish that she had never agreed to it.

  The Week … It seemed wonderfully long – the opposite of what she had imagined a marvellous time to be. She had thought that when she was really enjoying herself the time would go in a flash, but these seven days spun themselves out, so that after about two of them, she felt as though she had been living like that for years. The first day she felt very nervous. He was wearing his uniform as he had been the first night that she had met him. He put his arms round her and gave her a hug, kissing her face in a brotherly manner. He had made plans. They were to go to a revue, New Faces, at the Comedy Theatre. ‘I got seats for the early performance,’ he said, ‘so that we can have some supper before we drive down to Hatton. I know it’s not highbrow enough for you, but it’s supposed to be awfully good. Is that all right?’

  She said it sounded lovely.

 
‘There’s plenty of time for you to change and have a bath.’ He led her upstairs: the house seemed very quiet.

  ‘The servants are all in Wiltshire,’ he said. ‘My stepfather is going to shut the house and live in his club, or take a small service flat. He doesn’t want Mummy to be in London.’

  ‘Your stepfather?’

  ‘Yes. Did you think he was my father?’

  ‘I did. But nobody said his name. I mean, the servants called him Sir Peter, and you and your mother called him Peter, so how could I know?’

  ‘You couldn’t. Don’t look so anxious. My father died in the last war. I can hardly remember him.’ He showed her to the spare room and the bathroom a few steps down on a half landing. ‘I’m going to have a bath too. My quarters are up top. Don’t be long, I don’t want to waste you.’