The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  “Darling, if I was you, I would be counting my blessings. It’s a match that even our poor mamma would have approved of. And she would certainly not have thought Louise too young. I must say that I wish I was in your shoes. Angela shows no sign of an engagement to anyone and she was twenty-three last month. And, after all, you never wanted her to go on the stage.”

  “No, but he is fourteen years older than she is. Don’t you think that that is rather a lot?”

  “It simply means that he is old enough to look after her. How are you getting on with his family?”

  “Quite well, I think. We’ve had to do a good deal of liaising over plans. The Judge wanted it to be a dry wedding. He felt it would be more patriotic.”

  “Goodness! What did Edward say?”

  “He went white to the lips and said no daughter of his, et cetera. Of course, I had to tell them, but Lady Zinnia took it quite calmly. I think she has taken rather a shine to him.”

  Villy had dropped in for tea after taking Louise to have a fitting with Hermione and doing various other errands about London. She had made the arrangement ahead so there were no farcical problems like there had been the time before when she had just turned up, Jessica thought, and then thought it funny that she had not mentioned Lorenzo. She had been there for over two hours now; tea had developed into sherry while they went through all the family news, taking turns as they had always done, and according each other the ritual sympathy expected. Teddy had nearly finished his initial square-bashing in the RAF and was then likely to be sent somewhere for further training. “But the actual flying part they do abroad, in Canada or America. I must say I dread that.”

  “Oh, darling!”

  Christopher was still working in the market garden. He had acquired a second-hand caravan where he lived with his dog. “I never see him! He simply loathes London!”

  “Oh, darling!”

  Lydia was doing quite well with Miss Milliment, but she was going to have to wear a brace on her teeth and probably have one out as her mouth was overcrowded; and she was quite dreadfully untidy and never stopped talking and mimicked everybody. “And she’s picked up some dreadful language—from Neville, I think—and they have the most morbid obsession with death—they’ve been playing cemeteries all the summer and keep looking for things to bury.”

  “Darling, it’s only her age. What is she, about twelve? Well, she’ll soon grow up.”

  Nora was nursing and had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old airman whose back had been broken before he bailed out of his plane. “He’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but she is determined to marry him.”

  “Darling! You never told me!”

  “Well, I suppose I didn’t believe it would go on at first, but it has—for nearly a year. Would you believe it, it is he who doesn’t want to marry her!”

  “Goodness!” Villy tried to put the right amount of shocked surprise into her voice. “At least it would put paid to the idea of being a nun,” she said.

  “Oh, I think she’s over that. She’s far too bossy for that.”

  There was a pause, and then Villy, having groped for the most delicate way to phrase it, asked: “If she does marry him … would there be the chance of offspring?”

  “I haven’t liked to ask. I imagine not—” She fell silent, and for moments both sisters were occupied by the kind of thoughts that, naturally, neither of them would dream of voicing. Villy lit another cigarette, and Jessica poured them both more sherry.

  “How is Raymond?”

  “Oh, tremendously involved in his secret work at Woodstock. As it is secret, of course, he can’t tell me anything about it. But he seems to work fearfully long hours, and they live in some hostel so there is built-in company in the evenings. It’s ironic, really. When we had no money, he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a steady job with a salary—always wanted to run his own business and they always came to grief, and now when money isn’t so tight, there he is, in a steady job with a salary.”

  “He did do the school job.”

  “Yes—after the mushrooms failed. But that was largely so that Christopher could go to that school as we only had to pay half fees. I think he will be one of the people who will be quite sad when the war finally does come to an end. Going back to Frensham with nothing to do will be dull for the poor lamb.”

  “The end of the war seems a long way off.” Villy sighed. “Michael was involved in that raid on Dieppe last week.”

  “Was it meant to be the beginning of the invasion?”

  “Apparently not. No—Michael told Edward that it had been mounted because they had to find out what it would be like, but it must have been hell. We could hear the guns all day in Sussex—eerie and horrible. All we could see were the planes going over. Of course, Louise will have a very anxious time. Michael seems always to want to be in the thick of things.”

  Jessica sighed. “I suppose we are really rather lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “To have escaped all that kind of thing. I mean, we married men who’d come back from the war. We didn’t have to worry about whether they’d be killed.”

  “I can’t say that I feel particularly lucky,” Villy said stiffly, and Jessica thought: There she goes—just like Mamma, she has to be the tragedy queen …

  “How’s Edward?” she asked with deliberate brightness.

  “All right. Dead tired.” She looked at her watch. “Gosh! I must fly. Can I call a cab? I’ve got to get to Hugh’s to change. Edward and I are dining chez Storey—the wedding again. Thank you so much, darling. It was a lovely respite.”

  From what? Jessica asked herself, when Villy had gone. Without apparently having made the slightest effort, Villy had achieved this desirable marriage for her daughter. It was true that Louise was very good-looking, but Angela, though perhaps not so striking, was lovely with large, well-spaced features and an admirable figure, a statuesque girl with an air of remoteness that dear Mamma would deeply have approved of. But perhaps she was too remote: ever since that most unfortunate business with the BBC producer, nothing seemed to have happened to her. To begin with, this had been a relief, but now it was becoming a little worrying. She had left the BBC and got some job in the Ministry of Information which meant that, although she had registered for war service, she had not yet been called up. She shared a flat with another girl and Jessica hardly ever saw her. Her dreams of a debutante who married the right sort of person, had her picture in the front of Country Life and subsequently went to all the right sort of parties had faded. Now, she thought, she would be relieved if Angela married anyone at all.

  “Well?”

  “If you are asking me about the evening, Zee, I thought it both pleasant and sensible.”

  “Pleasant because?”

  “They are a nice couple. The backbone of English society.”

  “Ah! Of course you are right. I suppose I’ve always preferred the more decorative, less useful parts.”

  “He is an attractive man, surely? And a brave one. Two MCs and a recommendation for a Victoria Cross in the last war.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “And she is a pleasant woman.”

  “Oh, yes. Most wives are that. The number of pleasant wives I have had to put up with! Thank God you left politics. It has cut down the number of women one has to have to dinner.”

  He passed a fond hand over her wonderfully thick silver-white hair. “But, my darling Zee, if you had your way, there would be no women at all to have to dinner. There would be you—and a world full of handsome, entertaining, daring men. With just a few broody hens kept well in the background.”

  She smiled slightly, but her eyes were sparkling. “Tell me, what was sensible about the evening.”

  “I thought we got a great many of the tiresome wedding arrangements sorted out without either argument or acrimony, and I am told that this is seldom the case.”

  “It was very good of you to say that you would share the cost
of the reception.”

  “We are inviting so many people that it seemed to me right. And he is your beloved son. And you are one of the few women on whom it would be no good practising the cant of losing a son and gaining a daughter.”

  She indicated that she wanted to get up from the sofa on which she was lying.

  “Although you do like her, don’t you, darling?”

  “Little Louise! Of course I like her. I am delighted with her. So funny and charming and so very young!”

  She was on her feet now, and he put his arm in hers as they began the slow progress to their respective bedrooms.

  “And I shan’t lose my son,” she said. “Nothing but death would achieve it. And I have no intention of dying. I want to see my grandson far too much for that.”

  Louise

  Winter, 1942

  When she was alone, which was very nearly all the time these days, and when she was not completely inert—she would try to put the pieces of herself together into some recognizable shape so that she could sort of see what she was. At the acting school they had spent hours discussing characteristics of people—facets of their personality, aspects of their nature, quirks of behaviour or temperament. They had discussed characters in plays, of course, and over the weeks had condemned “bad” plays that had characters who were merely two-dimensional—cardboard cut-outs with no depth. Then, when she had talked about this with Stella and had trotted out all their theories, Stella had said: “Of course, that’s why Shakespeare and Chekhov are the only playwrights with genius. Their characters are more like eggs. However you approach their surface they are never flat, always tailing mysteriously off round a corner that isn’t even a corner, but at the same time you can always imagine the whole shape …”

  But she, although she was not merely a character in a play, did not feel at all like an egg; more like a bit of crazy paving, or part of a jigsaw puzzle. She did not feel like anyone she could recognize; even the disparate pieces of paving or jigsaw seemed hardly to belong to her, were more like a series of bit parts that she had become accustomed to, and was therefore good at playing. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh was one of them. The fortunate young wife of a glamorous man who, according to Zee, had broken innumerable hearts. People wrote “Mrs. Michael Hadleigh” on envelopes; it had been the caption to the photograph taken by Harlip that had appeared shortly after her marriage in Country Life. Receptionists in hotels called her that. This person had gone through a fashionable wedding with photographs of it in most of the newspapers. “I look like a new potato in white lace!” she had wailed, knowing it would make Michael’s family laugh. This person wore the gold watch that the Judge had given her as a wedding present and a turquoise and diamond ring that Zee had given her for her engagement. She had new luggage stamped L.H. in gold on the white hide. At Claridge’s, she had been given a room in which to change from the white lace to the suit Hermione had made her for going away—a pretty creamy tweed with a wide-spaced thin scarlet check on it, a straight short skirt and a short-sleeved jacket with light scarlet buttons. She had emerged from the lift to walk through the wide entrance to the hotel that was thronged with family and people she had never seen before in her life, to the Daimler where Crawley—the Judge’s chauffeur—was waiting to drive them away. Her topcoat had been forgotten, and Zee sent Malcolm Sargent for it. “Kind Malcolm will get it,” she had said, and he did. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh was the person who was eyed appreciatively by admirals, some of whom had sent huge packing cases full of what had clearly been valuable but was now shattered glass. These had been difficult to thank for, as in the worst instances, the fragments made it impossible to know what the object had originally been. “Thank you so much for sending us all that lovely glass,” she had written to one of them. A large number of people—many of them distinguished—were delighted to meet Mrs. Michael Hadleigh, and congratulated Michael with varying degrees of elegance and gallantry on his charming young wife. Sometimes she felt a little like a conjuring trick, the white rabbit he had so cleverly produced from nowhere. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh only seemed to come to life when there were other people present.

  Then there was the child bride. Her youth was endlessly harped upon, by senior naval officers, by friends of Michael, many of whom were even older than he. This also applied at Hatton, where she discovered they were to spend half of their honeymoon. “A week on our own, and then we’ll stay with Mummy,” Michael had said. She was the child: arrangements were announced to her with the ostensibly indulgent, slightly teasing admonition that she would like whatever it was, wouldn’t she? It would have been churlish to disagree, and she never did. Part of being the child bride was everybody approving of her—a good child bride … So—they had spent a week in a cottage lent to them by a godmother of Michael’s who lived in a large house in Norfolk. The cottage was pretty, with a reeded roof and a large open fireplace in the sitting room where they also ate. Lady Moy, the godmother, had arranged for somebody to cook and clean for them, and when they arrived, that first evening, it was to the enticing scents of a log fire and roasting chicken. Crawley brought in their suitcases, touched his cap and left, and when she had served them their chicken and shown them the damson tart lying on the trolley, the cook, who said her name was Mary, also left and they were alone. She remembered that she had thought, “This is the very beginning of my married life—the happily ever after bit,” and wondered what that would be like. And Michael had been full of the most charming admiration, telling her again and again how lovely she had looked as a bride and how lovely people had told him she was. “And just as lovely now,” he had said, picking up her hand and kissing it. Later, when he had poured two glasses from the bottle of hock Lady Moy had left for them, he had said: “Let’s drink to us, Louise and Michael.” And she had repeated the toast, and sipped the wine and then they had had dinner and talked about the wedding until he had asked her whether she would like to go to bed.

  Afterwards, when she slipped out of bed to put on one of the nightdresses her father had given her when she was fourteen that were still her best, she thought how lucky that this hadn’t been the first time, because at least now she knew what happened and was more or less used to it. She had, in fact, been to bed with Michael four times before: the first time had been awful because it had hurt so much and she’d felt she couldn’t tell him as he seemed so enthusiastic. The other times had been better in that it hadn’t hurt, and the beginning of one time had even begun to be exciting but then he had started to put his tongue in her mouth and after that she had a sort of black-out and felt nothing. He didn’t seem to notice, though, which at the time had seemed a good thing, but, and it happened gradually, during that first week of the honeymoon, she began to feel that it was odd that although he kept saying how much he loved her, and kept telling her how he was feeling and what was happening to him throughout his lovemaking, he didn’t seem to notice much about her. In the end she wondered whether the sharp sweet thrill—as though something was starting to open inside her—had actually occurred.

  That first night, however, she simply felt relieved that it didn’t hurt and he had seemed to enjoy it; she also felt suddenly dog tired, and fell asleep moments after she got back into bed.

  In the morning she woke to find him making love to her again and then there was all the novelty of having a bath together and getting dressed and a delicious breakfast with eggs and honey, and after it they went for a long walk in the park where there was a lake with swans and other waterfowl and then woods. It was a perfect September morning, mellow, balmy and still. They walked hand in hand, saw a heron, a fox and a large owl, and Michael did not talk about the war at all. During the week, they went and had dinner at the big house where Lady Moy and a companion existed in a state of elaborate decay. Most of the house was shut up and the rest of it seemed implacably cold; it was the sort of house, she thought, that made you want to go out of doors to get warm. Lady Moy gave Michael a beautiful pair of Purdey guns that had belonged to her husband
and two watercolours by Brabazon. “I’ll have them sent over to you,” she said; “And you,” she later said to Louise, “I could hardly choose a present for someone I had not seen. But now I’ve met you—and by the way, Mikey, I think you’ve done very well for yourself—I know what to do.” She rummaged about in a large embroidered bag and produced a small watch of blue enamel edged with pearls that hung from an enamelled bow with a brooch pin behind it. “It was given me by my godmother when I married,” she said. “It does not keep very good time, but it is a pretty thing.”

  During dinner Lady Moy asked Michael about his ship and he told her a great deal about it. She tried to be, and then to look, interested but the number of guns with which a new MTB was going to be equipped was not a subject to which she could contribute.

  It was not until they were about to leave, and Lady Moy asked them about their plans, that she learned that they were to spend the second week of Michael’s leave at Hatton.

  “Mummy is so longing to see us. And we thought it would be nice for her if we went.”

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  She found Lady Moy’s eyes upon her but she could not interpret their expression. “I must kiss you too,” she said after she had embraced Michael.

  They walked back down the drive to their cottage in the dark.

  “You never told me we were going to Hatton!”

  “Didn’t I? I must have. I’m almost sure I did. You don’t mind, anyway, do you?”

  “No.” She was not at all sure.

  “You see, darling Mummy is not very well, and she worried so frightfully about me that it seemed—she loves you very much, you know. She told me that she couldn’t imagine a better mother for her grandson.”

  She was aghast.

  “We’re not actually having one, are we?”

  He laughed, and squeezed her arm. “Darling, you’ll be the first to know that. There’s always a hope.”

  “But—”

  “You told me you wanted six. We have to start somewhere.”