The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  It was a disgusting job, made worse because she knew she was hurting him: some of the spots were oozing, but some simply had hard, shiny yellow heads that eventually spurted pus. He only flinched once, but when she apologized, he simply said, “Oh, no. Just get all the stuff out you can.”

  “Wouldn’t Matron do these for you?”

  “Lord, no! She hates me anyway, and she’s nearly always in a bate. She really only likes Mr. Allinson—the PT Instructor—because he’s got muscles all over him, and a boy called Willard whose father is a lord.”

  “Poor Simon! Is it all horrible there?”

  “I loathe and detest it.”

  “Only two more weeks and you’ll be home.”

  There was a short silence.

  “It won’t be the same, though, will it?” he said and she saw his eyes fill with tears. “It’s not my foul school, or the beastly war,” he said as he ground his knuckles into his eyes, “it’s my wretched style. They often make my eyes water. I often get that with them.”

  She put her arms round his stiff, bony shoulders. His awful loneliness seemed to be boring a hole in her heart.

  “Of course, if one has bee used to getting a letter from the same person every week, and then one isn’t going to get them any more, it stands to reason it would feel a bit funny at first. I think anyone would feel that,” he said with a kind of bracing reasonableness, as though he was minimizing somebody else’s trouble. Then he suddenly burst out: “But she never told me that! She seemed so much better at Christmas and then all this term she’s been writing and she didn’t say a word!”

  “She didn’t tell me. I don’t think she talked about it to anyone.”

  “I’m not anyone!” he began and then stopped. “Of course you aren’t either, Poll.” He took one of her hands and gave it a little shaking squeeze. “You’ve been wizard about my beastly spots.”

  “Get into bed, you’re freezing.”

  He fished in the pocket of his trousers, which lay on the floor, brought out an unspeakable handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Poll! Before you go, I want to ask you something. I keep thinking about it—and I can’t—” He stopped and then said slowly, “What happens to her? I mean, has she just stopped? Or has she gone somewhere else? It may seem idiotic to you, but the whole thing—death, you know, and all that—I can’t think what it is.”

  “Oh, Simon, I can’t either! I’ve been trying to think about that too.”

  “Do you think,” he jerked his head in the direction of the door, “they know? I mean, they never tell us anything anyway, so it might be just another of those things they don’t see fit to mention.”

  “I’ve been wondering that,” she said.

  “At school, of course, they’d go on about heaven because they pretend to be frightfully religious—you know, prayers every single day, and special prayers for any of the Old Boys who’ve got killed in the war, and the head gives a talk on Sundays about patriotism and being Christian soldiers and being pure in heart and worthy of the school and I know when I get back he’ll mention heaven, but anything they say about that seems to me so idiotic that I can’t think why anyone would want to go there.”

  “You mean, all the harp playing and wearing white dresses?”

  “And being happy all the time,” he said savagely. “So far as I can see, people simply grow out of happiness, and they’re against it anyway, because they keep on making one do things that are bound to make one miserable. Like being sent away to school for most of your life, just when you might be having a good time at home. And then wanting you to pretend you like it. That’s what really gets me down. You have to do what they want all the time and then you have to pretend to like it.”

  “You could tell them, I suppose.”

  “You couldn’t tell anyone at school!” he exclaimed, aghast. “If you said anything like that at school they’d practically kill you!”

  “Surely not all the masters are like that!”

  “I don’t mean the masters. I mean the boys. Everybody’s trying to be the same, you see. Anyway,” he said, “I just thought I’d ask you about—you know, death et cetera.”

  She had given him a quick hug and left him after that.

  Now, she thought, even before she played with Wills, she would write to Simon, having silently resolved then to take over the weekly letter to him at school. She pulled down the blinds in her parents’ room, picked up the box with the trinkets and took it to the bedroom she still shared with Clary. As she walked along the passages to the gallery over the hall, she could hear the variously distant sounds of the Duchy playing Schubert, the gramophone in the day nursery playing the now deeply scratched record of “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” a work that neither Wills nor Roly ever tired of, the Brig’s wireless that he used whenever he didn’t have anyone to talk to, and the spasmodic rasping of the old sewing machine, being used, she supposed, by Aunt Rach sides-to-middling sheets—an interminable occupation. It was Friday, the day when Dad, and Uncle Edward now that he was back in the firm, usually came down for the weekend, only this time they wouldn’t, as Uncle Edward had taken Dad away to Westmorland. Except for that, everybody was getting on with their lives as though nothing had happened, she thought resentfully, as she searched for some writing paper for Simon’s letter, which she decided to write in bed as it was slightly warmer than anywhere else could possibly be (the fire was not lit in the drawing room until after tea—another of the Duchy’s economies).

  She decided that the best thing was to give Simon as much news as possible about everyone. “Here is news of people in order of their age,” she wrote: this meant beginning with the remaining great-aunt. Poor old Bully went on again about the Kaiser at breakfast: she’s in completely the wrong war. Apart from him—the Kaiser, I mean—she talks a lot about people who nobody even knows who they are, which makes any sensible response difficult. And she spills even valuable food like boiled eggs all down her cardigans so Aunt Rach is always having to wash them. It’s funny, because we’re all used to Miss Milliment’s clothes being like that, but it seems pathetic with Bully. The Duchy gives her little jobs to do but she usually only does half of them. [She was going to put “She misses Aunt Flo all the time” but decided not to.] The Brig goes to London to the office three days a week now. He tried not going at all, but he got so bored, and it was so difficult for Aunt Rach to think what to do with him, that now she takes him up in the train and then to the office, and once a week she leaves him there and goes off to shop and things. The other days he plans his new plantation of trees that he’s going to plant in the big field on the way to where you and Christopher had your camp and listens to the wireless or gets Miss Milliment or Aunt Rach to read to him. The Duchy doesn’t take much notice of him (although I don’t think he minds), she simply goes on practising her music and gardening and ordering meals although there are so few things left to have on our rations that I should think Mrs. Cripps knows them all by heart. But old people don’t change their habits, I’ve noticed, even if to you or me they seem to be very boring ones. Aunt Rach does all the things I’ve already said, but in addition she’s awfully nice to Wills. Aunt Villy is plunged in Red Cross work and also does some nursing at the Nursing Home, I mean real nursing, not like Zoë, who simply goes and sits with the poor patients. Zoë has got quite thin again and spends all her spare time altering her clothes and making Juliet new ones. Clary and I both feel really stuck. We can’t think what to do with our lives. Clary says if Louise was allowed to leave home at seventeen, we should be too, but I’ve pointed out to her that they’d only send us to that stupid cooking school that Louise went to, but Clary thinks that even that would broaden our minds, which are in danger (she says) of becoming unspeakably narrow. But it also seems to both of us that Louise has become more narrow-minded since she’s been in the world. She thinks of nothing but plays and acting and trying to get a job in radio plays for the BBC. She behaves as though there isn’t a war or at least not for
her. Between you and me, she is pretty unpopular with the family, who think she ought to go into the Wrens. There is fuel rationing now—not that it can make much difference to us, as the only coal is used on the kitchen range. Simon, when you come back I’m going to take you to see Dr. Carr because I bet you he could get your spots better. Must go now because I promised Ellen to bath Wills as she finds bending over the bath very bad for her back.

  Love from your loving sister, Polly

  There, she thought, it wasn’t a very interesting letter, but better than nothing. It occurred to her that she didn’t really know much about Simon, as he had always been away at school and in the holidays had gone about with Christopher or Teddy. Now, with Christopher working on a farm in Kent, and Teddy having this week joined up with the RAF, there would be nobody for him in the coming holidays. His loneliness that had struck her so hard the evening after the funeral struck her again: it seemed awful that the only things she knew about him were those that made him miserable. Ordinarily, she would have talked to Dad about him, but now this felt difficult, if not impossible: one of the things that had happened in the last few weeks had been that her father seemed to have got further and further away from anyone until by the time her mother actually died, he seemed shipwrecked—marooned by grief. Still, there was always Clary, she thought, she was full of ideas; even if a good many of them were no good, their sheer quantity was exhilarating.

  Clary was in the nursery giving Juliet her tea—a long and rather thankless task; crumbs of toast and treacle lay thickly on the tray of her high chair, on her feeder and little fat, active hands, and when Clary tried to post a morsel into her mouth, she turned her head dismissively. “Down now,” she said again and again. She wanted to join Wills and Roly, who were playing their favourite game, called accidents, with their toy cars. “Just have some milk, then,” Clary said, and proffered the mug, but she simply seized it, turned it upside down onto her tray and then smacked the mess with the palms of her hands.

  “That’s very naughty, Jules. Give me a nappy or something, could you? I do think babies are the end. It’s no good, I’ll have to get a wet flannel or something. Watch her for me, would you?”

  Polly sat by Juliet, but she watched Wills. She had seen how he had looked up from his cars when she opened the door and his face had changed from sudden hope to a lack of expression that was worse than obvious despair. I suppose he does that every time someone opens the door, she thought: how long will it go on? When Clary returned she went and sat on the floor beside him. He had lost interest in the game and sat now with two fingers in his mouth and his right hand pulling the lobe of his left ear; he did not look at her.

  She had been thinking earlier that, really, her mother dying was perhaps worst for Simon because his particular loss had not seemed to be recognized by the family; now she wondered whether it was not worst of all for Wills, who was not able to communicate his despair—who did not even understand what had happened to his mother. But then I don’t either—any more than Simon—and they just pretend that they do.

  “I think that all religions were invented to make people feel better about death,” Clary remarked as they were going to bed that night. This—to Polly rather startling—statement came after they had had a long discussion about Simon’s unhappiness and how they could make his holidays better.

  “Do you really?” She was amazed to find that she felt slightly shocked.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. The Red Indians with their happy hunting grounds—paradise or heaven, or having another go as someone else—I don’t know all the things they have invented, but I bet you that was why religions started in the first place. The fact that everyone dies in the end wouldn’t make any single person feel better about it. They’ve had to invent some kind of future.”

  “So you think that people just snuff out—like candles?”

  “Honestly, Poll, I don’t know. But the mere fact that people don’t talk about it shows how frightened they are. And they have awful phrases like ‘passed away.’ Where the devil to? They don’t know. If they did they’d say.”

  “You don’t think then …” She felt rather hesitant about the enormity of the suggestion. “You don’t think they actually do know, but it’s too awful to talk about?”

  “No, I don’t. Mind you, I wouldn’t trust our family a yard about that sort of thing. But people would have written about it. Think of Shakespeare and the undiscovered bourne and that being the respect that makes calamity of so long life. He knew far more than anyone else, and if he’d known he would have said.”

  “Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?”

  “Of course, he might have made that just what Hamlet thought, but people like Prospero—he’d have made him know if he’d known.”

  “He believed in hell, though,” Polly pointed out. “And it’s a bit much to go in for one without the other.”

  But Clary said loftily, “He was simply pandering to the fashionable view. I think hell was just a political way of getting people to do what you wanted.”

  “Clary, lots of quite serious people believed in it.”

  “People can be serious and wrong.”

  “I suppose so.” She felt that this conversation had gone wrong several minutes ago.

  “Anyway,” Clary said, tearing her rather toothless comb through her hair, “Shakespeare probably did believe in heaven. What about ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’?—that wretched Jules has got treacle into my hair—unless you think that was merely a courtly way of saying goodbye to your best friend.”

  “I don’t know. But I agree with you. I don’t think anyone else really does. And it has worried me rather. Lately.” Her voice shook and she swallowed.

  “Poll, I’ve noticed something quite important about you so I want to say it.”

  “What?” She felt defensive and suddenly extremely tired.

  “It’s about Aunt Syb. Your mother. All this week, you’ve been sad about her for her—and for your father, and Wills, and now for Simon. I know you mean all that because you are kind and much less selfish than me, but you haven’t at all just been sad for yourself. I know you are, but you aren’t letting yourself be because you think other people’s feelings are more important than your own. They aren’t. That’s all.”

  For a moment Polly caught the grey eyes regarding her steadily in the dressing table mirror, then Clary resumed tearing at her hair. She had opened her mouth to say that Clary didn’t understand what it was like for Wills or Simon—that Clary was wrong—before a warm tide of grief submerged any of that: she put her face in her hands and cried, for her own loss.

  Clary stayed still without saying anything and then she got a face towel and sat opposite her on her own bed and simply waited until she had more or less stopped.

  “Better than about three handkerchiefs,” she said. “Isn’t it funny how men have large ones and they hardly ever cry, and ours are only good for one dainty nose blow, and we cry far more than they do? Shall I make us some Bovril?”

  “In a minute. I spent the afternoon clearing up her things.”

  “I know. Aunt Rach told me. I didn’t offer to help, because I didn’t think you’d want anyone.”

  “I didn’t, but you aren’t anyone, Clary, at all.” She saw Clary’s faint and sudden blush. Then, knowing that Clary always needed things of that kind to be said twice, she said, “If I’d wanted anyone, it would have been you.”

  When Clary returned with the steaming mugs, they talked about quite practical things like how could they—and Simon—all stay with Archie in the holidays, when he only had two rooms and one bed.

  “Not that he’s asked us,” Clary said, “but we want to be able to forestall any silly objections on account of room.”

  “We could sleep on his sofa—if he has one—and Simon could sleep in the bath.”

  “Or we could ask Archie to have Simon on his own, and then us at another time. Or you could go with just Simon,” she added.r />
  “Surely you want to come?”

  “I could possibly go some other time,” Clary answered—a shade too carelessly, Polly thought. “Better not talk about it to anyone or Lydia and Neville will want to come as well.”

  “That’s out of the question. I’d rather go with you, though.”

  “I’ll ask Archie what he thinks would be best,” Clary replied.

  The atmosphere had changed again.

  After that, she found herself crying quite often—nearly always at unexpected moments, which was difficult because she did not want the rest of the family to see her, but on the whole, she didn’t think they noticed. She and Clary both got awful colds, which helped, and lay in bed reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud to each other as they were doing the French Revolution with Miss Milliment. Aunt Rach arranged for her mother’s clothes to be sent to the Red Cross, and Tonbridge took them in the car. When her father had been away with Uncle Edward for a week, she began to worry about him, about whether he would come back feeling any less sad (but he couldn’t be, could he, in just a few days?) and, above all, about how to be with him.

  “You mustn’t,” Clary said. “He will still be very sad, of course, but in the end, he’ll get over it. Men do. Look at my father.”

  “Do you mean you think he’ll marry someone else?” The idea shocked her.

  “Don’t know, but he easily might. I should think remarrying probably runs in families—you know, like gout or being shortsighted.”

  “I don’t think our fathers are at all alike.”

  “Of course they aren’t completely. But in other ways they jolly well are. Think of their voices. And the way they keep changing their shoes all day because of their poor thin feet. But he probably won’t for ages. Poll, I wasn’t casting aspersions on him. I was just taking human nature into account. We can’t all be like Sydney Carton.”

  “I should hope not! There would be none of us left if we were.”

  “Oh, you mean if we all sacrificed our life for someone else. There’d be the someone else, silly.”