The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She started to worry about meals. Meals always used to be wonderful, but in the last two years they had got steadily duller. She began with the Duchy.

  ‘I was wondering’, she said with what she hoped was pensive sweetness, ‘whether we could possibly have roast goose on Saturday night. As a sort of treat for everybody?’

  The Duchy shot her a sharp look and was not in the least deceived.

  ‘My lamb, we shall be at least seventeen for dinner that night, eighteen if your father comes and that would mean three geese. Mrs Cripps couldn’t get them all in the oven – even supposing we could get them in the first place.’

  ‘Pheasants, then?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Well, not rabbit,’ she said.

  ‘That will be for lunch on Sunday. Mrs Cripps makes very good pies, you know that.’

  ‘Do you think she would like me to help her at all? After all, I can cook a bit.’

  The Duchy was clearly pleased. ‘I think that might be a very good plan. But you will have to do exactly as she says. It is her kitchen.’

  ‘I promise I will.’

  ‘I’ll speak to her this morning and see what she says. You may just have to be a kitchen maid, you know. Is that understood?’

  Louise took some of her worries to Archie, who listened, as he always did, with imperturbable gravity until she had finished. ‘Well, darling Louise, I take your point, but I shouldn’t worry too much. If I were Michael, I’d be far keener on seeing you and your exceptionally nice family than the sofa covers. Which, anyway,’ he added, ‘are rather nice. I only like things if they look used.’

  This point of view hadn’t occurred to her, but because it was presented by Archie, it made her feel much better.

  Villy, too, was in a state of high tension about the weekend. It was something she had wanted for so long, it had been put off so often, that even now, on Saturday morning, she felt that something might go wrong at the last minute. And when she wasn’t worrying about that, she was feeling anxious about it happening. Meeting Lorenzo with his wife – and possibly with Edward there as well – he still wasn’t sure whether he could get away, although she didn’t know quite why he couldn’t know – was going to be a peculiar strain. The chances of being alone with Lorenzo for a minute were remote, and even if they occurred, the likelihood of interruption was so great, that nothing could be said. She had managed to telephone Jessica to say how sorry she was that they would not be able to have her that weekend but, to her surprise, Jessica had said that she would not have been able to come anyway. She expected Raymond up for a weekend’s leave from Woodstock, and she knew the house was very full, so both of them coming was out of the question.

  Villy, immensely relieved, said, ‘I’ll give him your love, shall I?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lorenzo.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, do do that.’ She seemed about to laugh. ‘But not Mercedes, I think,’ she said.

  Saturday morning was a turmoil. Clary and Polly spent it moving themselves to the squash court. The maids made up the beds for the visitors, did all the bedrooms, lit Mr Archie’s fire, washed the extra china and glass needed and were hardly through before dinner time – twelve thirty – in the kitchen. There, Mrs Cripps had made four pounds of pastry, plucked and drawn four pheasants, made two rice puddings, three fish pies, for lunch that day, and a huge pan of bubble and squeak for the kitchen dinner, jointed, floured and fried five rabbits for the Sunday pies, made two pints of onion sauce and two pints of bread sauce – she allowed Louise to help with these. Edie scraped fifteen pounds of potatoes, cleaned five pounds of leeks, and five pounds of Brussels sprouts, scraped three pounds of carrots, washed up breakfast, middle mornings and laid the table for kitchen dinner. Ellen, in the smaller children’s night nursery, ironed the clothes of Wills, Roly, Neville and Lydia – she missed the baby very much, but it was a blessing not to have all those nappies to air. Christopher took Neville and Lydia to the spring to fill up three dozen bottles with drinking water which then had to be put in a wheelbarrow and taken back in batches. They soon got bored, and played with Oliver. ‘He has turned into a very nice dog,’ Lydia said approvingly. ‘Aunt Rachel said that people got to look just like whatever dog they had.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Neville said. ‘She said dogs got to look like their person.’

  ‘That’s a very boring way round.’ She stroked Oliver’s black and white forehead and touched his grape-coloured nose. ‘It would be much more interesting if Christopher had topaz eyes and a black nose.’

  ‘She meant it in a manner of speaking,’ Neville said loftily.

  ‘When people say that they just mean that it isn’t what they meant.’

  ‘Come on, you two. It’s your turn to fill some bottles. My hands are freezing. Stop quarrelling and help.’

  ‘We weren’t quarrelling. We weren’t quarrelling.’ Neville was outraged. ‘We were simply talking about a subject.’

  Villy went to Battle and did an enormous shop for the household, and also collected prescriptions from the nursing home, had them made up and returned them. She collected their quota of paraffin for the cottage and the Brig’s study, and paid the monthly accounts at the garage, grocer and Till’s, called on the piano tuner, who had missed his last appointment, and then returned to mend the carpet sweeper, a fuse in the cottage – poor Miss Milliment had spent the previous evening with no light – and finally braved the stables to put new batteries into the wireless Wren had been given by the family last Christmas. He had received it without expression, but he played it all of every day when he was not asleep or at the pub. He had started the morning by sawing wood as he had been told to do by McAlpine, but he soon got tired of it and set about repainting the stable door. But as he couldn’t be bothered with sanding down or with undercoats and was simply slopping another coat of gloss on top of the old one, it was rather a mess and he was just deciding to give it up when Villy appeared. He was incapable of putting in the new batteries himself. His skills with horses – no longer wanted – had once made him a cocky belligerent little man; now he had retreated into a sullen ineptitude. He still retained respect for Mrs Edward, though; she never forgot him, unlike some – ‘some’ being everybody excepting the Brig who, on red-letter days, he took riding on a leading rein since the poor gent had lost his sight. He was kept going by his burning hatred for motor cars and the Germans, and his salary, which he drank. Mrs Edward, having made the contraption work again, offered him a cigarette. He took it, touched the side of his forehead like a nervous tic and put the cigarette carefully in’ his waistcoat pocket. He would have it with his dinner, he said. He did not eat at the house. Edie put a covered plate outside the stable door every day; it was usually stone cold by the time he fancied it.

  Such a sad little man, Villy thought as she walked away.

  She didn’t ought to wear trousers, he thought watching her across the courtyard. He never wore them himself, and despised anyone who did, although he had had to admit that when Mrs Edward took to riding astride, he’d had less trouble with saddle sores. Still, breeches were one thing, trousers were quite another.

  In another five and a half hours he will be here! Villy thought as she ran upstairs to wash for lunch.

  Sybil spent the morning playing with Wills and Roly, who were beginning to play with each other. This cut both ways: they took toys from each other and there was spasmodic rage and grief. ‘You can’t have that – it’s too important for you,’ Wills said once, wresting a red painted engine from his cousin. Roly did not fight back: he simply wept and nothing would please him until suddenly something else did. In the afternoon they would have rests, and then Ellen would take them for a walk. Sybil would have a delicious sleep and then it would be teatime and then Hugh would come. There were all those other people as well, but it was Hugh who would make her day. She smiled as the thought occurred to her that she was looking forward to his coming – and they had been married now for nearly twenty-
one years – quite as much as Louise could be looking forward to her Michael.

  Dolly spent the morning trying to find her bottle green cardigan, the one Flo had made her – it must be ten years ago. It was only after she had been through all the shelves and drawers twice that she remembered that Ellen had taken it away to wash. She also wrote a letter thanking somebody she hardly knew from Stanmore who had seen about poor Flo in The Times and written a very nice letter. ‘She will be greatly missed,’ she wrote back in her large spidery hand. A few sentences tools up all the paper. Their house at Stanmore had been shut up for a long time. I suppose I shall never go home, now, she thought. But then she would not wish to do so alone – without Flo. She did not want to do anything without her, but now she had to do everything. She had been such wonderful company. Dolly often found herself having conversations with Flo who, no longer there with her own opinions, now agreed with everything Dolly said, but somehow this made the conversations shorter, and not so interesting. She did try once or twice disagreeing with herself, but she never felt she quite caught the flavour of Flo’s mind. She had been taught from a young girl to bear adversity, and she did not complain or mourn openly to anyone, but this simply left her with little or often nothing to say. The Duchy had kindly suggested that she might like to change her bedroom after Flo died, but no, she would never do that. The room was where she could best remember her – except, of course, at dear Stanmore where they had lived all their lives, with both, and then one parent, and finally by themselves. She thought sometimes now that they had lived all their lives on the sidelines, as it were, in the slipstream of other people’s events. Being bridesmaids at Kitty’s wedding, rejoicing in the schoolroom that Papa had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, comforting their mother when their younger brother Humphrey had been killed in the war, nursing their mother, comforting their father, and finally nursing him … there seemed to have been nothing direct, no circumstance entirely belonging to them. And now she was left, and so fortunate that Kitty had married well and could take her in. But if there hadn’t been a war, she thought with sudden fear, I should have been at Stanmore and I should have been entirely alone with only Mrs Marcus coming three times a week and Trevelyan mowing the lawns on Saturdays. It was Flo who had been so good at opening tins: modern food had been a blessing although not always easy to digest …

  There was a knock on the door and it was a child telling her it was lunch-time. The child was Lydia.

  ‘Thank you, Louise dear,’ she said.

  ‘She ought to know I’m not Louise, because I don’t wear lipstick,’ Lydia said to herself, as, there being no one looking, she slid down the banisters to the hall.

  Edward and Hugh drove down together. Diana, rather to Edward’s relief, had gone to Scotland to spend a lugubrious Christmas with her parents-in-law. She had, of course, taken Jamie, and the older boys would be joining her when they broke up. It did simplify things – temporarily.

  ‘I suppose this will be just the weekend when Goering will arrange another nice little blitz.’

  ‘I know, that’s why I thought we’d better take the car. One of us can get back if need be. Unlikely though. I think they’ve got their hands full. They’re not doing so well on the Russian front, are they? Do you remember how bloody cold it was in the trenches? A Russian winter must be twice as bad. And a lot of the time we weren’t even trying to advance.’

  ‘It always seems amazing to me’, Hugh said, ‘that Napoleon got as far as he did. How the hell did they even feed the horses – let alone the men?’

  ‘Dunno, old boy. I should think they ate the horses.’

  ‘I must say, though, I preferred being frozen to the awful thaw and all that mud – and stench.’

  ‘At Hendon,’ Edward said, ‘I never told you, but they brought a crashed German bomber, and when I went into it, the smell was exactly the same as when one went into a German trench. The same sweet smell – entirely different from ours – my God, it took me back.’

  ‘I remember that. Sausage, garlic, cigarettes, latrines …’

  ‘I suppose we smelled just as different to them.’

  They had crossed the river and were threading their way through streets of terraced houses, gaps in them where there were heaps of rubble and parts of walls with torn wallpaper, and sometimes lavatory cisterns and fireplaces still intact.

  ‘London’s getting pretty shabby,’ Edward remarked. ‘It’s funny to think that there are cities lit up with all the buildings untouched. I’ve always wanted to go to New York.’

  ‘I don’t. I just want London back like it was. But if the Americans go to war with Japan—’

  ‘You think they will?’

  ‘I think Japan is determined that they should. God knows why.’

  ‘If they do, it means we’ll have the Americans on our side.’

  ‘Roosevelt doesn’t want war with Japan.’

  ‘Surely we don’t want war with Japan? We’ve got enough on our plate as it is.’

  ‘But it would be a help to have the Americans sharing the plate with us,’ Hugh said. Some time later he asked, ‘Do you still want to go back into the RAF?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I don’t think it’s practicable. The firm really needs the two of us. Managing the Old Man is a half-time job. The older he gets, the more he seems to want to interfere in everything.’

  ‘He is going to be eighty-one any minute. And we wouldn’t have the best stock of hardwoods in the country if it wasn’t for him. Remember how we used to argue about him buying too much?’

  ‘I do. I just wish he’d make a proper job of retiring, bless his heart.’

  ‘Well, he won’t. I’ll be glad if you don’t go back. I need you.’

  Edward, glancing sideways, thought how very much older his brother had got in the last year.

  ‘It’s marvellous that Sybil is getting better,’ he said.

  Hugh was silent. He didn’t hear, Edward thought, and then he thought, of course he did. He looked quickly at Hugh again. He was fumbling with his cigarettes – balancing the packet against his stump, so that he could pull one out.

  ‘No – she’s in remission,’ he said flatly. ‘Her doctor told me it often happens.’

  ‘Dear old boy! Does she know?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No,’ he repeated, ‘I’m pretty sure she doesn’t.’

  Edward found he couldn’t speak. He took a hand from the steering wheel and touched Hugh’s rigid shoulder. They did not talk at all for a long time after that.

  ‘Well,’ said Clary as they trudged with their torches, some time after dinner, in the dark to the squash court. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The guests, stupid. I thought Mrs Clutterworth looked as though everything that she didn’t like had happened to her.’

  ‘She did look rather broody. Of course, not being English, it’s hard to tell. She might be just homesick for her native land, wherever that may be.’

  ‘She’s Spanish.’

  ‘She didn’t look Spanish. But actually,’ Polly added truthfully, ‘I don’t know what Spanish people look like – except in pretty old paintings. She liked Uncle Edward.’

  ‘But she kept on watching Lorenzo. Laurence he’s really called. I noticed Aunt Villy called him that. Lorenzo must be a secret joke between her and Aunt Jessica. What did you think of him?’

  ‘I simply can’t imagine anyone being in love with him.’ Then she remembered them on the train. ‘But I suppose some people have to be in love with the unlikely ones. But his teeth stick out, and his hair’s all greasy and he has a red mark between his eyes when he takes off his spectacles.’

  ‘The Duchy liked him,’ Clary remarked.

  ‘The Duchy likes talking about music. Anyway, let’s get on to the other one.’

  ‘The famous Michael Hadleigh?’

  They had reached the squash court, Polly unlocked the door and they were assailed by the odour of warm rubber balls and tennis shoes
. They climbed up the stairs to the gallery where their beds had been placed by Christopher that afternoon. They still had to use their torches because the blackout wasn’t much good.

  ‘Well,’ Polly said, ‘he wasn’t one thing or another, was he? I mean, he wasn’t quite one of them, and he certainly wasn’t one of us.’

  ‘Wasn’t he sort of in between – like Louise?’

  ‘Not quite. Louise was acting frightfully grown-up, and he was treating her as though she was a terribly clever child.’

  ‘Patronising her!’ Clary snorted. ‘Catch me being in love with anyone who did that!’

  ‘She got bored when he talked about the war. Which he did, rather a lot, I thought. But then he went off with Louise after dinner.’

  ‘She took him to see Archie.’

  ‘Well, I bet that was only partly what they did. I bet she found some nice dark corner so that he could kiss her.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘She took him to see our room.’

  ‘She did that before dinner.’

  ‘Well she took him afterwards as well. I must say,’ Clary said pensively, ‘this would be a ghastly house to be in love in. There’s nowhere to be with the person at all.’

  ‘And I suppose one needs to be.’

  ‘Of course. It’s because people in love say such idiotic things to each other that they’d be afraid of other people laughing.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  ‘Think of Gerald du Maurier in Punch. “Darling!” “Yes, darling.” “Nothing, darling. Only darling, darling!”’

  ‘I honestly don’t think people go on like that nowadays!’

  ‘The modern equivalent. Listen! Is that her?’

  They listened, but there was no sound of Louise, due to join them at some point.

  ‘Do you think he wants to marry her?’

  ‘She wouldn’t be allowed: she’s too young.’

  ‘If she did, we could be bridesmaids.’