‘Yes. It’s like those drawers in the chest on chest. They just cared about making things beautifully, never mind whether it showed at once that they had.’
Before he started the car, she put her arms round him and gave him three kisses. ‘Thank you, Dad, it’s the best present I’ve ever had.’
They went to the front, and walked along past the fishermen’s tall thin black huts in which the nets were stored. It was a fine, breezy day with white horses on the empty sea. Barbed wire and concrete pyramids were ranged along the beach making it impossible to reach the sea. They walked, without talking, in a companionable silence. She felt unusually, immensely happy. The double glow of receiving her ring, and the thought of giving Clary her desk box prevailed. ‘Breathe deeply, Dad,’ she said, ‘the sea air will do you good,’ and he smiled his gentle, affectionate smile at her and made a ridiculous noise breathing.
‘I’m done good to,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and find a nice pub on the way home.’
When they were seated under an apple tree in the pub garden and her cider and his beer had arrived he said abruptly, ‘Did Mummy ever talk to you about the possibility of her having to have another operation?’
‘Not much. She did mention it, weeks ago, but then when I asked her if it was going to happen, she said they had changed their minds. That was before you went on your holiday.’
There was a silence while he stared into his glass. Mystified, and beginning to feel frightened, she said, ‘That was a relief, wasn’t it? She never said, but I knew she was dreading another operation as the last one made her feel so rotten. It must have been a relief.’
‘Did she say it was a relief?’
‘She said—’ She thought: it seemed important to get it right. ‘I said, oh, what a good thing, you must be relieved, and she agreed. She agreed, Dad. And she was terrifically pleased about the holiday. She said she was only tired when she got home because she hadn’t slept much on the train coming back. And she only asked me not to tell you that because she didn’t want to worry you. It wasn’t important. She often has odd days in bed.’
‘Does she?’ He was lighting a cigarette and she noticed that his hands weren’t steady.
‘Oh, Dad! You worry so much about each other, but you always have. And I think the thing is she really wants to be in London with you. She misses you. I think you ought to let her.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, in a tone which she knew meant he wouldn’t. ‘Bless you,’ he added: it was a kind of full stop.
As they got into the car, he said, ‘Are you looking forward to giving Clary her box?’
‘Like anything. She gave me a lovely birthday present. All kinds of butterflies in a glass case – for my house. But I think she’ll burst into tears of joy when she gets the box. It may make her a bit happier for a change.’
‘Is she very unhappy?’
‘Oh, Dad, of course she is. She absolutely won’t consider Uncle Rupe being dead and never seeing him again. She makes up all kinds of stories about him, and she wrote to General de Gaulle because she thought he might be a spy in France for us, and he didn’t answer for ages and then she got a letter back saying that enquiries had been made, but no one of that name was known. I thought then that she might face up to the fact that he has died and she won’t see him, but somehow she can’t. She loves him too much to bear it.’
A shock. Her father, without any warning, suddenly broke into dry almost shouting sobs – put his head on his arms on the steering wheel and sobbed and sobbed. She turned in her seat and put her arms round him, but he didn’t stop.
‘Darling Dad. I’m sorry. Of course he’s your brother and you must mind terribly as well. And I suppose you have faced up to it, and it must be awful. It’s so final, isn’t it? Poor Dad.’
In the end she realised that talking didn’t help and simply held him, and in the end the sobbing got less and he fumbled for his handkerchief and blew his nose. When he had wiped his face, which he did as though he wasn’t used to it (but then, she supposed that he wasn’t used to crying), he said, ‘Sorry about that, Poll.’
‘Don’t be. I absolutely understand.’
When he had started the engine and they were on their way home, she said, ‘And I shan’t tell Clary. It would only distress her if she knew that you felt there was no hope. Although’, she finished tentatively – she did not want to upset him again, ‘there’s always a shred of hope, isn’t there, Dad? Don’t you think?’
‘Must be,’ he answered, but so quietly that she hardly heard him.
She didn’t have Dad to herself for a long time after that, because of course, to be fair, he had to take Simon out for one morning and, anyway, he spent most of the weekends with Mummy and Wills. Clary wasn’t much impressed with the emerald ring until Polly told her that it was Elizabethan, whereupon she asked to hold it. ‘Anyone might have worn it,’ she said. ‘One of Mary Stuart’s ladies-in-waiting for instance. Think of it! It might have been there when the poor thing was executed! I must say, I think that is rather a possession.’ But she was immediately and utterly thrilled by her writing box, opening and shutting it speechlessly, her eyes filling with tears. ‘It shows you must – like me quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Oh, look! A secret drawer!’ Caressing it, she had touched a spring and a very shallow drawer flew open beneath the space for papers. There was a small thin piece of paper in it folded like an envelope. The paper, opened flat, was covered by spidery writing written in two directions. ‘Like letters in Jane Austen! Oh, Poll, what a joy! It’ll take me years to read it. The ink’s gone all brown. But it might be a very important letter.’ They tried and tried to read it, but even with a magnifying glass they couldn’t make it all out. ‘It seems to be mostly about the weather and how expensive muslins are,’ Clary said at last. ‘There must be other things, or it might be a code, but whenever I get to what might be an important word it runs into the one going the other way and I can’t read it.’
Strangely, when they showed it to Miss Milliment, she was able to decipher it. ‘People wrote like that when I was a girl,’ she said. ‘Postage was expensive, and people did not wish to waste the paper.’ It was all about the weather and the price not only of muslins, but lace, merino, and even a muff.
‘Anyway, it is a very old letter,’ Clary said as she folded it tenderly back into its envelope shape. ‘And I shall always keep it in its secret place. Polly, it is the most exotic and amazing thing I’ve ever had. I’ll keep all my writing in it.’ She was writing a series of short stories that were linked to one another, by a character from each one carrying on to the next, and sometimes read bits to Polly in the evenings which was far happier than her accounts of Uncle Rupe’s life in France, but she only read the bits she wasn’t sure were good enough, so Polly never got the whole story. ‘You’re a sounding board,’ Clary said severely, ‘you’re not meant to enjoy the story.’
Now, as she hastily swept off all her other things that lay on her dressing-table, in order that the desk should sit in state by itself, she said, ‘Thank you, Poll. It must mean – you’re the most friendly friend.’ Then she added, ‘It must have cost you an awful lot of money,’ and Polly, knowing that this would make Clary feel more loved, replied, ‘Well, yes, it did a bit.’ She felt that she was getting to be quite good with people, which, as she had no other worthy gifts, was something.
‘What do you think Miss Milliment could possibly have looked like as a girl?’ she asked when they were getting ready for supper.
Clary thought. ‘A sort of pear, in pigtails?’ she suggested. ‘Do you think people ever said, “What a beautiful baby”?’
‘They can’t have. Unless they were trying to be kind to Mrs Milliment.’
‘I should think she must have needed people to be kind to her.’
‘Oh, I don’t agree. Mothers always think their babies are beautiful. Look at Zoë and Juliet.’
‘Jules is pretty,’ Clary said at once. ‘But, then, your mother thought Wills was lo
vely, and I know he’s your brother, but honestly nobody could have enjoyed looking at him.’
They were taking an extra amount of trouble with their appearance, because the man who had been Uncle Rupert’s friend was arriving that evening in time for dinner. Clary was taking trouble because he was her father’s friend, and Polly because she loved dressing up, and brushing her hair a hundred times, and pushing up her eyebrows with her finger and then smoothing them into a fine line, and making sure that the seams of her stockings were straight, and putting on her jewellery. For Clary, taking trouble meant ironing her best blouse and trying to find a pair of stockings that matched, and scrubbing her fingers in a vain effort to get the ink off them. Neither of them mentioned the fact that they were taking extra trouble although each knew that the other one was.
‘I wonder what Dad’s friend will be like,’ Clary remarked with careful carelessness.
‘Well, he’s bound to be old.’
‘What do you mean “old”?’
‘Too old for us. Nearly forty.’
‘Really, you sound as though you’re considering marriage with him.’
‘Don’t be a fool. He’ll be married himself, anyway. People are, by that age.’
‘As a matter of fact, he isn’t. I happen to know that the person he wanted to marry didn’t want him, and Dad said that was partly why he went and lived in France.’
‘His life has been blighted, you mean?’ Polly couldn’t conceal her interest in that.
‘Probably. We shall be able to tell by looking at him. So keep an eagle eye out, and we’ll compare notes. Archie Lestrange. Archibald Lestrange,’ she repeated. It sounds like someone in a John Buchan. Archie would be the hero, and Archibald the villain.’
He was definitely Archie, Polly thought. He was immensely tall, with a dome-like forehead and fine black hair receding from it. He had heavy lids to his eyes and an expression in them that looked as though he was either secretly amused, or wanted to be.
He’d been wounded and walked with a limp; he also had a slight stammer. The Duchy had put him next to her at dinner and was clearly rather fond of him. They talked about far-off days, before this war, and, Polly thought, just after the war before that when he used to come and stay at the house she and the Brig had had at Totteridge, when he and Rupert had been at the Slade. He seemed to know the family quite well, not only her grandparents, but Dad and Uncle Edward and Aunt Rach. He’d been best man for Uncle Rupert’s first wedding to Clary’s mother, and he’d obviously met her mother and Aunt Villy, although he clearly didn’t know them so well. For dinner there was roast chicken and bread sauce and he said how wonderful it was to have such lovely food. ‘In Coastal Forces,’ he said, ‘our ships were just too small to warrant a trained cook, and only the most gormless rating volunteered for the job. Great haunches of lamb would appear either streaming with blood or black as your hat with unspeakable potatoes – all grey and shiny, like frightened people’s faces. Later he said that he’d volunteered for the Trade, but they weren’t making submarines to fit people of his size.
Afterwards, when she and Clary were undressing for bed they swapped impressions.
‘He’s nice. I can see why your dad liked him. Funny-looking though. Rather cavernous.’
‘He’s been ill. I thought he looked rather tragic. People often get a stammer when something terrible has happened to them.’
‘You mean his leg being shot?’
‘No, stupid. I mean the person not wanting to marry him. I should think that’s left him with an awful inferiority complex.’
Recently she had taken to attributing this state to nearly everyone, largely, Polly thought, because it was something difficult to disprove.
‘He didn’t seem to be particularly inferior.’
‘You don’t have to be inferior, you just feel you are.’
‘Oh, well, hardly anyone doesn’t feel that.’
‘It’s funny that, isn’t it? I mean you’re with yourself all the time, so you’d think you’d be clearer about yourself than about anyone else. I mean, look at you, Poll. You’re terribly pretty, jolly nearly beautiful, and so kind and nice, and you’re always saying you don’t know what you’re for, and you’re no good and things like that.’
‘So do you.’
‘Oh, well,’ Clary said, ‘my eyebrows are too thick and I’ve got awful legs that only bulge at the knees – no ankles like lucky you – and my hair’s too fine, and I’ve got a hideous nature and a squashy nose and claustrophobia – you said that so don’t try to get out of it now – so I can’t see that I’ve much not to feel inferior about.’
‘There you are!’
By now, Archie Lestrange was forgotten, and they embarked upon a very enjoyable half-hour’s competition to see who could run herself down the most, with the other one contesting every point, until sleep overcame Clary which it always did without the slightest warning: she was talking nineteen to the dozen and then she was suddenly gone.
In the morning Clary said, ‘One thing about Archie – he told me to call him that – he seemed awfully shy with Aunt Rachel.’
‘She’s an unmarried lady. He probably feels shy with all of them, after what happened to him.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course he would, poor thing.’
The sad thing that happened in August was that it turned out that Angela wasn’t going to get married as she also turned out not to be having a baby. What was sad about this, Polly felt, was that bang went her chance to be a bridesmaid, something she had wanted to be the whole of her life. The first part of this information came through direct questioning: did Aunt Villy think that Angela would have her as a bridesmaid? No, because she wasn’t getting married after all. The second part arrived obliquely via Louise, home for the week while her theatre was closed for essential repairs, who got a letter from Nora in which she said how shocked she was that Angela wasn’t having a baby.
‘Extraordinary,’ Clary said. ‘You’d think it would be the other way round.’ Louise refused to discuss it with them for the same old boring reasons that it wasn’t their business and they were too young anyway.
‘How can one be too young for discussion of any kind?’ Clary shrieked. She hadn’t been at all interested until told that she should not be, then, at once, her curiosity and suspicions were aroused. ‘I’m through with Louise. I’m really through. She has gone beyond the pale.’ She asked Zoë what she thought, and Zoë said that she imagined that Angela must have had a miscarriage. ‘But the man she wanted to marry was married,’ she said, ‘so I expect it will be all for the best in the long run.’ When Clary told Polly this, they both rolled their eyes and echoed ‘the long run’, and Clary said she was all for short cuts and this made them fall about.
It was odd, Polly thought as she picked runner beans for Mrs Cripps to slice and salt down for winter, how frivolous she was. She could make jokes with Clary, and play silly games with Wills, and be fussy about her appearance and all the time the war was going on, and not going very well for the Allies as far as she could see. Hitler was making alarming progress in Russia and people were saying that the Japanese were becoming offensively arrogant, and if they came into the war on Hitler’s side, it would either prolong it for ever or, worse, it might mean that Hitler would win: they would be back to it being as frightening as it had been last summer, the threat of invasion, and all that.
Pursuing her policy of trying to do things to make other people’s lives nicer for them, she decided to talk to her mother about her going to London so that she could be with Dad. ‘You see, Mummy, I could look after Wills in the week for you. And you’d be coming down every weekend. And Ellen would help, I know she would. So why don’t you just tell Dad you’re coming? Or, better still, just go and be a lovely surprise for him when he gets back from the office? I don’t mean to be bossy,’ she added – she didn’t actually think she was being that at all – ‘but I’m sure he wants you to be there – it’s simply that he is being unselfish.’
> Her mother was sewing name tapes onto Simon’s grey socks and handkerchiefs for next term. ‘Darling, I couldn’t go when it’s Simon’s last week of the holidays. You know how he minds going back.’
‘All right, but you could after he’s gone.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Then she added, almost petulantly, ‘Oh, why can’t we just all be together? Simon having to go away to school, and Wills being so young and needing me, and Hugh having to be in London! It’s too bad. I’m not much of a cook, you know. I don’t know whether I could make Hugh the kind of meals he likes.’
‘Oh, Mummy, you could do what Aunt Villy does when Mrs Cripps has her evening off. She reads Mrs Beeton and then she just does exactly what it says. Think of that rabbit stew last week.’
‘Well, darling, I really will think about it,’ but she said it in tones that meant she would rather think than talk.
Well, Polly thought, she’d done her best. It seemed odd to her, if you wanted so badly to be with your husband, to make a fuss about the cooking.
Teddy and Simon went back to school. Dad took them up on a Sunday evening and out to dinner at his club, and then saw them off on the train the next morning. Teddy went off without a tremor: it was his last two terms and as he hadn’t done too well in his exams in the summer, he was to retake some of them, and then as he told everybody interminably, he would be able to join up and start learning to fly. But Simon was sick on the Sunday morning and didn’t want any lunch and wanted to be with Mummy all day. She played bezique and racing demon and chess with him, but even his easy victory over her with the last did not cheer him much. Everybody tried to be very jolly and encouraging: ‘It’ll soon be Christmas,’ Polly said to him, ‘and you know how you love that.’
‘I may have toothache,’ he said at teatime. ‘I feel as though at any minute a tooth is going to start to hurt. It’s funny, but I’m usually right about things like that.’
But it did not make – as she knew he knew – the slightest difference. When she had to wave them a smiling goodbye, her mother turned and walked slowly back to the house, and when Polly was sent to fetch her for dinner, she said that she didn’t want any. She had been crying, her voice sounded indistinct and slurred, and she almost pushed Polly out of the room and shut her door.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 91
