After Isobel died, Rupert had come for a week to stay with him – a strangely docile, shattered Rupert, who could not even laugh without tears coming to his eyes, who, like an insomniac, could not keep still from his grief, fidgeted endlessly with pencils and cigarettes, kept leaping to his feet and shambling about the studio knocking into things. After the first awful day, Archie took him for three-hour walks and fed him with large bowls of stew: ‘You’re treating me as though I was an enormous dog!’ Rupert had exclaimed after the third day of this regime, and as he had begun to laugh at himself, he had burst out crying and been able to talk about Isobel without stopping until the early hours, when the stove had gone out, and cocks were crowing.
The next day when, instead of a walk, they went out to paint together, Rupert said, ‘You really are a friend, Archie. Much more of one than I was to you. I always felt bad about that. But I suppose you needed to get right away.’
And after a bit, he added almost shyly, ‘But you’re over it now, aren’t you? You don’t mind me asking?’
‘No,’ was all Archie had said, and he was over it. Which had been true, in a sense: he no longer ached for her, and days passed when he did not even think of her, only when he had once or twice seemed to be on the brink of loving someone else, had she intervened and he had drawn back. He had found a succession of girls to paint, and to go to bed with, who cooked for him, and mended his clothes and were sometimes amiable company, but he never got further than affection and lust.
Archie had returned to England in the autumn of 1939 to volunteer for the Navy. He and Rupert had had one hilarious evening in Weymouth when they both got very drunk and then they had gone their different ways, he to Coastal Forces, and Rupert to a Hunt class destroyer. When he had heard the news of Rupert he had written to the Duchy, of whom he had always been extremely fond, and she had replied, saying that if he had leave and wanted somewhere to stay he would be welcome. So then, when he got shot up and they’d done all they could for his leg, he’d taken up the invitation. He knew Rachel had not married, and he’d wondered how he would feel when he saw her again. After the first evening, he wondered why he had wondered, because he had felt, not exactly the same, but quite as much. She had only to give him her hand, to look at him with her lovely frankness, to speak in her gentle drawl that was so like Rupert for him to be back in thrall to her beauty and the astonishing lack of vanity that had always moved him. If she was in the least self-conscious about their last meeting, there was no sign of it. He hardly ever saw her alone: her job in London, she described herself as ‘a kind of stooge at the office’, and her duties at home – she seemed always to be unobtrusively doing something for somebody else – precluded that. It was she who told him how hard Clary had taken her father being missing, and had asked him to deal gently with her determination that he was not dead. On another occasion she had mentioned how passionately interested in painting Miss Milliment was and how she enjoyed talking about it: ‘Rupe said she was amazingly knowledgeable as well as perceptive.’ Then there had been the Brig, who so much enjoyed having The Times read to him. Their rare duologues were always about somebody else. But he discovered that he enjoyed taking Rachel’s various hints, and in the autumn weeks that followed, he slipped easily into the family life. His leg still hurt a good deal, especially if he used it much, but he had been told that it was a long business, and when, in October, he had suggested to the Duchy that perhaps it was time he moved on, she had said, ‘My dear, what on earth for, and where to?’ Unlike the Cazalets, his family was small and far from close knit: after his father died, his mother embraced Gurdjieff and had no time for anyone who did not do the same, and his only sister, far older than he, had married a Canadian doctor and he had seen her once in the last twenty years. She had had five children who seemed identical except for their size, like so many ring spanners, and he only knew this because their Christmas card consisted every year of a family photograph. No, there was nowhere to go and, from his point of view, not only no reason to leave, but a growing need to stay. He had quite decided that he must make one more attempt to get Rachel to marry him but the more he thought about it the more nervous he became about asking her: for once she had said no – if she said no (and his confidence was not strong on this point) – surely that would be the end of his chance of love, of staying on with the family? It was too easy to let things slide, to postpone the proposal. He told himself that she was getting to know him again, that it was too soon and so on. He told himself a lot of things that he naturally had wanted to believe.
But now that was all over. He could stay as long as he liked and it would make no difference. During that curious evening, that brought him feelings both of devastation and release, he thought he had recognised something that the rest of the family did not. It was a secret, and how hard, he thought tenderly, for someone as direct and innocent as Rachel that must be to bear! Sid seemed accepted in the family: when, after dinner, she had apologised to the Duchy and said that she did not feel up to playing sonatas, the Duchy had said of course not! She should go to bed with a nice hot-water bottle and a hot drink, and Rachel had instantly got to her feet and gone to procure these things.
In bed that night, he had started to try to examine how he felt: love, it seemed to him, was more painful than it was anything else, and not, he could see, only for him. Rupert’s unknown fate hung over them all; upon his strange, gaunt, intense little daughter, upon his wife who once Archie had thought such a frightful mistake: he remembered Rupert saying at the end of their week alone in France after Isobel’s death: ‘Well, I shall have to marry someone – anyone, quiet and homely – who will be a mother to the children,’ and then visiting him on his honeymoon with that amazingly attractive, frivolous little pussy with whom he was clearly infatuated. ‘This is Zoë,’ he had said, as one who is presenting a goddess, a queen, the beauty of all time, and he had seen at once her narcissism, her childish selfishness, her determination to have always and only her own way in everything. She was not like that now. She was paler, less sparkling, tentative about almost everything except the baby. He had been touched when he had said how pretty the baby was, and she had answered at once, ‘But she’s awfully intelligent – like Rupert. She’s going to have a first-class education and a proper career. She’s not going to be at all like me.’ Unlike Clary, she could not speak of Rupert: one day she had tried, but her eyes had filled with tears, her face contorted, and without another word, she had run out of the room. And the Duchy. When she mentioned Rupert, which he noticed she only did if she was alone with him, he saw her making a steadfast effort to do so calmly. Alive or dead, Rupert was deeply loved, not least by him, Archie. I seem to have lost the two people I have loved most in my life, he thought. Then he realised that his leg was hurting too much for him to get to sleep and hoisted himself out of bed to find his painkillers. ‘Maudlin,’ he muttered to himself: Rachel had never been his, so in that sense it could not be said that he had lost her, and as for Rupert – why could he not have Clary’s faith? Because he knew more about the decrepit, hysterical, corrupt uproar that France had become: Daladier and Blum being jailed for life for ‘causing the defeat of France’, hostages being shot – two hundred of them for the deaths of two German officers – the Vichy government responsible for the arrest and deportation of thousands of Jews, Pétain blaming British agents for any insurrection, house-to-house searches for any French ‘disloyal’ to that senile puppet. It would be hard to survive as a foreigner in that, even with very good French. He would need a great deal of support and protection – the cost of being a loyal Frenchman was already terrifyingly high, yet there were such people. Being shot up on the bridge of an MTB was nothing to that, he thought, as he dropped into sleep.
Edward woke early with the unnaturally bright feeling that meant, he knew, that he had a hangover. It was the hooch that he’d had to buy in the Coconut Grove. And then when you had been made to buy a whole bottle, you drank more than you usually would because, da
mmit, you’d paid for the stuff in the first place. He’d taken Diana dancing, because the poor girl got very little fun stuck away in the country with that po-faced sister-in-law and Jamie, now an exhausting three-year-old. But he’d been tired at the beginning of the evening: he had just started back at the wharf and was confounded by the mess they were in there. In the best part of a year, Hugh hadn’t succeeded in getting the second sawmill working. It was true that the blitz had wreaked havoc, and one shed had been decimated, but all the same … Orders were pouring in for hardwoods, for which they were justly famous, but they had to be able to cut the veneers. The machinery hadn’t been too badly damaged, but Hugh had made the terrible mistake of leaving everything exactly as the blitz had left it so that the damage assessors could see exactly what had happened. Which was no bloody good if you left expensive machinery without adequate protection from the winter elements. It was no good blaming the poor old boy: what with his anxiety about Sybil, and the fact that he had none of the family to support him – except Rachel who, after all, knew nothing at all about the business, but was wonderful with the staff – he had had far too much on his plate. He was obstinate at the best of times, but in the past he and the Old Man had been able to steamroller things when it was really necessary. But what worried him now was that alongside the obstinacy, Hugh had become frighteningly indecisive – more like dear old Rupe. He kept saying he’d think about it when any decision had to be made, and two days later nothing at all would have happened, and Edward found himself having to nag. The result was that everything was in a muddle: the accounts department was a shambles since Stevens had been called up; their crane was always breaking down because Hugh hadn’t bullied the manufacturers for new parts – in horribly short supply, anyway. Their lorries were in a bad way too. Several of them needed replacing, but there was a fat chance of that and, again, the chap who’d been so incredibly good at repairing the engines had been killed last autumn in the blitz. The fire-watching was a nightmare. It meant that, in succession, blokes who had worked all day got no sleep at night. The paperwork had trebled since ninety per cent of their business was now Government orders. He’d almost wished at the end of yesterday that he had been driving down with Hugh for a nice quiet undemanding evening. But he felt guilty about Diana, whom he sensed was relying on him more and more. That husband of hers had become a paratrooper and had not had any leave for months.
As Diana’s flat had been bombed, they had gone in the end to Lansdowne Road – officially shut now, but still containing basic furniture. He knew she disliked going there, but a hotel was a bit risky. Ever since that awful evening with Louise he had felt pretty windy about being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time with Diana. A night club was one thing – nearly everyone he knew went to them and usually with somebody they weren’t married to since families were so separated by the war – but an hotel was another.
She was fast asleep beside him. Dinner had been fine. There had been oysters, a most welcome addition to their five-shilling meal, and they were given real butter with their bread. ‘I know one chap’, he had said, ‘who asks for a roll, and scoops out all the middle of it and fills it with all the butter on the table and shuts it up again and takes it home for breakfast.’
‘Isn’t it awfully embarrassing being watched doing it? By waiters and people?’
‘He doesn’t seem to care a damn.’
‘I must say,’ Diana had said, ‘Goering is the wrong shape to have made that remark about guns or butter. He does look as though he gets all the butter—’
‘And we get all the guns. Darling! Were you very upset about your flat?’
‘Oh, well, in a way, you know. It was home. Although I never liked it much. It did have all my things in it. I feel as though I’ve been camping for years.’
‘Is Isla still as stiff as ever?’
‘Exactly as stiff. The archetypal sister-in-law. She feels that there must be something really juicy to disapprove of about me, but she hasn’t found out what.’
‘I can’t think how anyone could disapprove of you.’
‘She could, darling. And you’re the really juicy thing. Actually, I don’t know if I can stay there much longer.’
‘Does Angus want you to go to his parents, then?’
‘Oh, he always wants that. But I simply couldn’t bear it. Their ghastly Victorian sub-castle is freezing cold even in August, and now they’ve gone teetotal because of the war.’
‘Good God!’ He was shocked. ‘What’s that supposed to do?’
‘They feel it’s patriotic.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s a useful place for the older boys for holidays. I have to go up then, or I’d never see them. Isla, as you know, hasn’t got room for all of us.’
That was the first mention she had made of not staying with Isla, but it hadn’t seemed particularly important. After dinner, they went to Regent Street, to the Coconut Grove. They were early: it was only about eleven and they parked right outside.
‘Whisky or gin?’ he had said when they were presented with this choice.
‘Gin, I think.’
He ordered a bottle and several tonics, but the gin, when it came, tasted so foul that they decided to add some lime juice instead, and have soda instead of tonic. This took ages to arrive, so they danced. Holding her was a pleasure, both familiar and exciting. She was wearing a violet-coloured dress that, although he had not noticed it, matched her eyes; the crepe clung to her splendid big-boned body and revealed just the right amount of her handsome breasts. They danced slowly to ‘All The Things You Are’. ‘My promised breath of spring-time,’ he hummed and smiled down into her eyes, and she glowed.
At the end of the dance, she took his hand, and said, ‘Oh, darling! I’m so happy.’
‘I’m always happy when I’m with you,’ he answered. Their soda water and lime had still not arrived, and he called a waiter to say this, but neither of them felt this mattered as much as he had told the waiter it did. They sipped their gin and tonic: she made a face, and said, ‘It might just make us pass out.’
‘Simultaneously, two enormous ninepins,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t like that at all.’
They smoked and watched the other dancers, and soon picked out a very young couple – a guardsman – and a tall, rather ungainly red-haired girl dressed in white. ‘A sort of Queen Charlotte’s Ball dress,’ Diana said. But what made them watch, what was striking about them, was that they were so madly in love – could not take their eyes off each other, were scarcely moving on the floor. They were misty-eyed, intoxicated with desire for one another: very occasionally, he bent his head and his lips brushed her white shoulder and she half closed her eyes, and then they looked at each other again and he would hold her closer.
‘Very touching,’ Edward said: he was touched.
‘Poor darlings,’ Diana said. ‘I bet they have nowhere to go.’
‘Surely, if they really want to, he’ll find somewhere.’
She shook her head. ‘They’re too young. And too well brought-up. I expect he’s asked her to marry him, and her parents have told them to wait until she’s older. Even though he may be killed.’
‘Do you think we should ask them if they’d like to go back to Lansdowne Road?’
‘Of course not. I just feel sorry for them – that’s all.’ There was a pause, and then she said, ‘We’re not going back there, are we?’
“Fraid so. Darling, I know it’s not very comfortable, but it is private.’
‘You mean nobody except your wife might find us?’
‘I swear she’s in the country. I swear she won’t turn up.’
‘But I want to talk to you,’ she said with apparent inconsequence.
‘Talk away.’
‘Not here. It’s serious. I’ve got to come to some decision.’
When he simply looked at her enquiringly, she said, with the faintest impatience, ‘I have sort of told you already. I can’t stay much longer with Isla.’
He couldn’t
see why this was something she couldn’t talk about there and then, but knew it would be unwise to say so.
‘Well, shall we consider going back?’
When they left, the young couple were still on the floor, entranced. They had not stopped dancing at all except on the brief occasion when the band had a short rest.
‘He can’t hold her in his arms if they are sitting at a table,’ Diana said, as they went out.
Lansdowne Road, although possible as a place to sleep, was definitely no longer a place to have an intimate talk. There was nowhere to be, really, except in bed in his dressing room. The rest of the house had been shut up for so long that it seemed full of dust and cold, dead air.
‘Aren’t you living here in the week?’ Diana asked as he told her to wait in the hall while he turned on the electricity.
‘No, I’m with Hugh. It seemed stupid to keep two houses open, and the old boy is fearfully lonely. There.’
But the light only showed up the desolation. They went, without speaking, upstairs.
‘Oh, damn! I should have turned on the gas as well,’ he said.
By the time he had done that, had lit the gas fire and found some linen for the bed, which she made, there was a feeling of tension between them. She sat before the fire, huddled in her skunk jacket.
‘Like a drink?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Well, I think I’ll have one.’
He kept a flask of whisky in his overcoat pocket, in case of air raids and generally being stuck somewhere. The tooth glass had a rime of dried toothpaste: the last time he’d stayed here had been weeks ago, that awful evening with Louise … he felt so ghastly when he thought about that, that most of the time he managed not to think about it at all. He rinsed the glass, poured himself a tot and added water.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 94
