“Not if we all did it …” and they were into their game, founded on the rhetorical question that Ellen used constantly to ask Neville when he behaved badly at meals. “If everyone in the world was sick at the same time it would be very interesting. I should think we’d all drown,” he had said after consideration, thereby, as Clary had pointed out, neatly making a nonsense of the whole notion. But almost as soon as they embarked upon playing it, they both—separately—recognized that it had lost its allure, their sallies were feeble and they no longer collapsed in giggles over them. “We’ve outgrown it as a game,” Clary said sadly. “Now all we have to look forward to is being careful not to say it to anyone else, like Wills or Jules or Roly.”
“There must be other things,” she said, wondering what on earth they could be.
“Of course there are. The end of the war and Dad coming back and being able to suit ourselves because we’ll be too old for them to boss us about and white bread and bananas and books not looking old when you buy them. And you’ll have your house, Poll—think of that!”
“I do, sometimes,” she answered. She sometimes wondered whether she had outgrown the house as well, without, so far as she could see, growing into anything else.
The Family
Spring, 1942
“Are you going to London, Aunt Rach?”
“I am. How on earth did you guess?”
“You’re wearing your London clothes,” Lydia answered, and then after careful scrutiny added, “I honestly think you look nicer when you aren’t in them. I do hope you don’t mind my mentioning the fact.”
“Not at all. You’re probably right. It’s ages since I had any new ones.”
“What I mean is, I don’t think you ever looked your best in them. You would probably be the kind of person who ought to wear a uniform so that you were the same all the time. Then one could just notice whether your eyes were happy or not.” She was hanging about in the passage by the open door to Rachel’s room watching her as she packed an overnight suitcase. “Clothes age you,” she said finally. “Unlike Mummy. I think clothes youthen her—her best ones, that is.”
“Don’t kick the skirting board, darling. The paint will come off.”
“A lot of it’s off already. This house is getting most dilapidated. I wish I was going to London.”
“Darling, what would you do when you got there?”
“Go and stay with Archie like the lucky others. He’d take me to the cinema and out to a huge exciting dinner and I could wear my christening present jewellery and we could have steak and chocolate cake and crème de menthe.”
“Are they your best things?” She was trying to decide whether she needed to pack bedroom slippers or not.
“They would be if I ever had them. Archie said they had meat in his ship every day. It’s bad enough being a civilian, but being a civilian child … In restaurants it’s bound to be different. It’s ghastly bad luck to be living in a place where there aren’t any. You don’t wear make-up either, do you? I shall. I shall wear very black red lipstick like film stars and a white fur coat except in summer. And I shall read frisky books.”
“What kind?”
“You know. It’s French for not very nice. I shall tear through them by the dozen in my spare time.”
“Talking of spare time, oughtn’t you to be with Miss Milliment?”
“It’s the holidays, Aunt Rach. I should have thought you would have noticed that. Oh, yes. And I shall ask Archie to take me to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud. I suppose you’ve seen them?”
“I must have, I suppose, but years ago.”
“Well, what kind of horrors are they? Because I’d rather know before I went. Neville pretends he’s been. He says the floor is running with blood, but I’m not tremendously interested in blood. And he says there are moaning sounds of torture but he is not at all a truthful boy so I am none the wiser. So what are they?”
“It’s ages since I went there, my duck, I don’t remember—except a tableau of poor Mary Queen of Scots being executed. But I expect Mummy will take you to London some time during the holidays.”
“I doubt it. She only takes me to Tunbridge Wells—for the dentist. Do you know something silly about Mr. Alabone? When you go into his room, he’s always standing by the chair, and he takes two steps forward to shake you by the hand. Well, the carpet has two worn-out places where he takes the steps and they really look squalid and if he varied his gait it wouldn’t happen. You’d think that someone intelligent enough to make holes in people’s teeth would know that, wouldn’t you? I did mention it to him, because with the war the chances of his being able to get a new carpet are rather slim, if you ask me. But he simply said, ‘Quite, quite,’ so I knew he wouldn’t take any notice.”
“People seldom take advice,” Rachel said absently. The times that she had begged Sid not to live on sandwiches, to take a lodger who would at least contribute to the household expenses and perhaps do a little cooking were foremost in her mind. “I like to have the house to myself. Then, when you come, my dear love, we can have it to ourselves,” was all that Sid would say to that. Today, tonight, would be one of those—increasingly rare—times. Perhaps I ought to learn to cook, she thought. Villy has learned, after all, but then Villy is so good at tackling entirely new things.
“Why are you taking so many handkerchiefs? Are you expecting to be awfully sad in London?”
“No. But the Duchy always made me take six for a weekend, and a dozen if I was going away for a week. It has just become a habit. One had to have a clean one every day, you see, even if one hadn’t used it.”
“So if you went away for a month you had to have forty-eight handkerchiefs. If you went away for three—”
“No, no, then they would get washed. Now go and see if you can find Eileen for me.”
“Okey-doke.”
Alone, she looked at her list. On one side of it were the things she had to see to before she caught the train. On the other, the things she must try to get done in London, when she’d finished her day at the office, where she sat in a black little room doing accounts and listening to the repetitive woes of the staff, who had early found her the perfect repository for all their troubles. At least she would not be accompanied by the Brig, who had had a cold that had turned into bronchitis and had been forbidden by Dr. Carr to leave the house until he was better. Miss Milliment would keep him occupied. He was editing an anthology on trees, and she was doing so much of the work that really, Rachel thought, she deserved to be part-author. But Aunt Dolly was to be looked after by the Duchy and Eileen, which meant Eileen, as Aunt Dolly preserved an entirely fictitious independence in front of her sister and would admit no help. It would be Eileen who would have to stand around for hours, searching for garments that Aunt Dolly wished to wear. Rachel felt she must warn Eileen that many of the searches would be fruitless, since Aunt Dolly often chose clothes that she could not have possessed for many years. “The best thing is to say that they are in the wash,” she told Eileen. “Poor Miss Barlow’s memory is not what it used to be. And just choose whatever you think most suitable.”
“Yes, m’m.”
“And her medicines. She’s frightfully keen on taking them, which means that when she forgets, she’s liable to have a second dose. It’s best if you give them to her with her breakfast and then take them away—you may put them in my room. She also has one yellow pill at night.”
“And what about her bath, m’m? Will she be wanting me to draw that for her?”
“I think she will prefer to wash in her room.” Rachel felt she could hardly expose Aunt Dolly’s deep aversion to baths—she alleged that they were dangerous and that her father had forbidden her to take more than one a week. “She will go to bed after the nine o’clock news, so you need not be late. Thank you, Eileen. I know I can rely on you.”
That was another thing done. What a fuss just for two nights, she thought, but then, when I am in the train, I shall be able to look forwa
rd to two lovely evenings. She and Sid had been dogged by bad luck for weeks now. First, of course, because of poor Sybil, and then the Brig falling ill, and the Duchy had had a frightful cold which meant she could not go near him. And then Simon had come back for the holidays and Polly had been worrying her—altogether, it had been impossible to leave the house for more than her hours at the office. But somehow Sid didn’t seem to understand that she had obligations to the family—and to the house, come to that—that had to come before pleasure. Their last argument about this, in a tea-shop near Rachel’s office where Sid had come for a miserable sandwich, had been really rather painful, and afterwards, although of course she had never told Sid, she had cried. The only place to do that had been the very nasty ladies’ lavatory at the office, on the sixth floor of the building where the usual lav paper was pieces of the Evening Standard cut into squares and attached to the wall by a piece of string, and the pipe leading to the cistern leaked. Sid either assumed that she wanted to go back to Home Place to look after Wills and Aunt Dolly and the Brig (which, in a way, was true because she wanted to do what she felt was right), or worse, she accused Rachel of not caring about her—sometimes, as on the tea-shop occasion, both. She knew that Sid was lonely, missed her teaching at the boys’ school, although she had recently taken one or two private pupils which helped her precarious finances, and found the ambulance station extremely boring a good deal of the time but, after all, one could not expect life to be anything but dull and tiring in war-time. And that was the least of it. When she thought of Clary’s vigil for her father, from whom, of course, nothing had been heard since the little Frenchman Pipette O’Neil had brought those scraps of paper back with him, and of the degree to which poor Hugh was shattered by Sybil’s death, of Villy now having to face her son becoming a fighter pilot and seeing less and less of Edward; when she thought of poor little Wills and Polly and Simon each in their different way trying to come to terms with the loss of their mother … when she thought of all or indeed any of these things she felt that being bored or lonely or actually rather often exhausted was hardly comparable, or deserving of complaint. She does not always think of others, she thought, reverting to Sid: it was a serious indictment. She went in search of the Duchy, whom she found in the drawing room, mending china at the card table, which was spread with newspaper.
“I’m off now, Duchy dear. Anything I can get you in London?”
“Not unless you can find a new kitchen maid.”
“Is Edie leaving?”
“Mrs. Cripps tells me she wants to join the Women’s Air Force. She is so cross about it that Edie’s petrified and bang went another of the Copeland plates. As she says, Edie only breaks the best.”
“Have you spoken to Edie?”
“Not yet. But in any case I shouldn’t feel justified in asking her to stay. I rather admire her for wanting to serve her country. She came straight from school to us. She has never left the village. I think it’s rather brave of her. But, of course, Mrs. Cripps is beside herself. I shall have to find a replacement, drat it, but goodness knows how. Is Mrs. Lines still operating, do you know? That rather good agency—in Kensington, wasn’t it? They might have someone. After all, kitchen maids are usually below the call-up age. You go, darling, or you’ll miss your train. But you might see if Mrs. Lines is still going, and ask them. If you have time.”
“I will. And don’t forget to remind Tonbridge to pick up the piano tuner.”
“I won’t.”
At least she didn’t ask me to go to the Army and Navy Stores to get anything, she thought. The Duchy patronized very few shops and was convinced that any others were no good. She bought household linen from Robinson and Cleaver; her own clothes, acquired very occasionally, from Debenham and Freebody; material from Liberty, and practically everything else from the Army and Navy, which, being in Victoria Street, was not near anything else. As she had not been to London since the war began she relied upon her daughters-in-law and Rachel to provide her with her modest but none the less exacting requirements.
“Have you your gas mask, Miss?”
“Thank you, Tonbridge. It’s packed.”
As she settled into the back of the car, with Tonbidge tucking the old felt-lined fur rug over her lap, she thought how extraordinary war was; the juxtaposition of the gas mask and the fur rug seemed precisely to mirror what most of life was now like. Or like for the useless, stay-at-home people like me, she then thought. I do nothing to help end the war; I do nothing useful except trivial things that anyone else would probably do better. The depression that had descended upon her when she had finally realized that her beloved Babies’ Hotel had had its day descended yet again. The hotel had returned to its London home briefly after the Munich business, but then a combination of shortage of funds and shortage of girls who wished to train as nurses had gradually overwhelmed the whole enterprise. Matron had retired to look after an aged father, the replacement had been unsatisfactory, and by the time the blitzes on London began the whole thing had come to an end in the nick of time, since the premises—then mercifully empty—had received a direct hit. But it had been the last, indeed the only time that she had felt she had some sort of career. Now she was forty-three, too old to be called up and unable—or unwilling—to volunteer for anything more than supporting her parents and any others of the family who might need her. And then, one day, eventually her dear parents would die, and then she would be free to live with Sid. Then she would be able to look after Sid, make her happy, put her first, share everything with her. When, as now, she was by herself, it seemed sad that she could not talk about this future with Sid, but when they were together, the fact that this future depended upon her parents’ death somehow made it impossible to mention, let alone discuss.
In the train, she decided that she would buy Sid a gramophone, something she had never been able to afford. This idea made her feel suddenly far happier: they would have such fun choosing records together, and Sid would have it to assuage her loneliness. She would get a good machine, one of the ones with a large horn and thorn needles that were supposed to be less hard on records than the steel ones. She would go to HMV in Oxford Street in her lunch hour to choose one, and might very well be able to take it straight to Sid that evening in a taxi. It was a splendid idea—almost a solution.
“Honestly, darling, as soon as I’ve had this baby, I’ll simply have to find somewhere else to live. Apart from the fact that the cottage is far too small for the boys, it isn’t even really large enough for Jamie and a baby. And poor Isla can’t have anyone to stay.”
She did not add that her sister-in-law was driving her mad, because she knew that people not getting on with each other simply embarrassed him.
They were lunching in a small Cypriot restaurant off Piccadilly Circus which he had described as convenient and quiet. Its convenience escaped her, but it was certainly quiet. Apart from a couple of disconsolate-looking American officers, there was nobody there. For lunch they had had rather tough chops surrounded by rice and tinned peas. It wasn’t at all the sort of place he usually took her to and she wondered, as she had when they walked in, whether he was embarrassed at taking somebody so conspicuously pregnant out to lunch. She had said she could not drink wine, and now, after the meal was over, the waiter brought her a carafe and poured some water into her glass. It was tepid, and tasted of chlorine. The hard chair on which she was sitting was extremely uncomfortable. On the wall—painted a rather dirty yellow—in front of her was a poster with an impossibly blue sky, a mountain with a ruin on top and in the foreground a ferociously smiling Greek Orthodox priest. The waiter arrived with small cups of Turkish coffee, upsetting the three paper carnations that stood in a vase on the table. He righted it with a flourish and then laid a saucer with two lumps of Turkish delight upon it in front of her with a benevolent smile directed at her belly. “On the house,” he said, “for Madame.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “It wasn’t much of a lunch. But I thought
we’d rather go somewhere quiet, where we could talk. This coffee is perfectly beastly. I shouldn’t drink it.”
But they hadn’t talked much, she thought.
“What about Scotland?” he now said.
“I couldn’t live there! They wouldn’t want me.”
“I thought you said that they did.”
“That was only immediately after Angus died. They felt they had to offer. They’d have been appalled if I’d agreed.” She felt panic rising. He couldn’t—surely he wouldn’t—try to ditch her now.
“I thought it might be a temporary solution for the older boys,” he said.
Burying anything else he might have thought, she said, “Well, it would be, in a way. But it means I wouldn’t see them.”
There was a pause.
“Darling, I feel so utterly useless. It’s just a bloody awful situation. I ought to be looking after you—and I can’t.”
Relief flooded over her. “I know you can’t. I do understand.”
His face brightened. “I know you do. You’re a marvellous person.” He started to tell her, for the hundredth time, how he could not possibly leave Villy, but luckily the waiter came with the bill and he became occupied in paying it while she went in search of the lavatory. As she repaired her face—she really wasn’t looking her best, had overdone her make-up in the morning—she felt self-pity besieging her like a fog. They had nowhere to go, nowhere where they could quietly spend the time until she had to catch her train; the perm that she had had that morning in Brook Street (her excuse to Isla for escaping to London) looked tight and artificial and not at all as though it would ever be a success; her back ached from the uncomfortable chair and her best shoes had made her feet swell. The thought of being driven to the nursing home by the local taximan when the time came to have the baby, possibly unable even to tell him that she was going and then being visited by Isla, who would go on and on about its likeness to Angus and indeed the whole Mackintosh family, filled her with a kind of irritable despair.
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