The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She did not demur. Homesickness—not quite, but nearly—as bad as she had had as a child had been assailing her, and she would lie in bed after he left in the mornings, longing for the familiar, shabby house that was always so full, the sounds of so many lives going on; the gasping squeak of the carpet cleaner, the wheezing grind of the nursery gramophone alternating “The Grasshoppers’ Dance” with “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”; the steady rumble of the Brig dictating, the insect whirr of the Duchy’s sewing machine, the smells of coffee and ironing and reluctant log fires and damp dog and beeswax … She went through each room in the house furnishing them with the appropriate inmates. Everything that had either bored or irritated her about them before now seemed only to make them more charming, dearer and more necessary. Aunt Dolly’s passion for mothballs, the Duchy’s belief that hot paraffin wax was essential for burns, Polly and Clary’s determination not to be impressed by her being so much more grown-up than they, Lydia’s uncanny impersonations of anyone she chose to emulate; Miss Milliment looking exactly the same, but none the less mysteriously older, her voice gentler, her chins even softer, her clothes encrusted with random pieces of ancient foods, but her small grey eyes, magnified at certain angles by her narrow, steel-rimmed spectacles, still so unexpectedly penetrating. And then, a complete contrast, Aunt Zoë who contrived to look glamorous whatever she wore, whose years now in the country had not at all altered the impression she gave of being fashionable and pretty. And darling Aunt Rach whose uttermost word of approval was “sensible”—“such a sensible hat,” “a really sensible mother”: “I am going to give you a really sensible wedding present,” she had said. “Three pairs of double linen sheets.” These were all at home with the many other presents, waiting until she and Michael had a home of their own, although God knew when that would be. Perhaps it was entirely the war that was making life seem so strange. Going away to the cooking school and then to the rep had seemed like logical excursions from home—all part of growing up and preparing for her great career on the stage. But being married had changed everything—in many ways that she had not envisaged. Leaving home was a much more final business when one married. As for her career, not only was there no sign of the war ever coming to an end, when she supposed she might resume it, but there was the problem of having children as well. Her mother had stopped dancing when she married: had never danced again. For the first time, she wondered what that had been like for her, whether her mother had minded or had chosen just to be married. But somehow, in her nostalgic dreaming about Home Place and her family, she could not, or did not want to, include her parents: there was something—and she did not want to find out what—that was vaguely … uncomfortable. All she knew was that in the weeks before the wedding, she had come to dislike being alone with her mother nearly as much as she disliked being alone with her father—although not exactly, if at all, for the same reasons. This had been confusing, because she could see that her mother was trying very hard to do everything to make the wedding a success. She had been endlessly patient about the fittings for the dress and her few other clothes, had given her clothes coupons, had even asked her whether she wanted her friend Stella to be a bridesmaid. Stella hadn’t wanted to—had been gently adamant—and it had been a question of choosing which of the girls; in the end it had been Lydia and Polly and Clary. Zoë and her mother and the Duchy had made their dresses of white curtain net that her mother had dyed in tea so that it was a warm cream colour. Pure silk ribbon was still available in London shops. Aunt Zoë had chosen the colours, pink, orange and dark red, and she had sewn the ribbons together in strips to make sashes. The dresses had been plain, high-waisted, with low round necks and a deep flounce round the bottom—“Like little Gainsboroughs,” the Judge had said when he saw them outside the church. There had been an awful lot of work in the short time between the engagement and the marriage and most of it had fallen upon her mother. But besides all her organizing, the letter-writing, the arrangements and the discussions, she had sensed something about her mother that she simply could not bear: it had made her cold, sulky, irritable; she had snapped when asked perfectly ordinary questions and then felt ashamed but somehow unable to apologize. In the end she discovered what it was: the night before the wedding her mother asked her if she “knew about things.” She had instantly said, yes, she did. Her mother had smiled uneasily and said, well, she had supposed that Louise would have learned all about that sort of thing at that awful acting place, adding that she would not have liked her to enter upon marriage “unprepared.” Each allusion made the whole thing seem nauseating and the allusions, she had realized, were only the tip of the iceberg. In a fever of revulsion and anger it had seemed to her then that her mother had been thinking of nothing else all these weeks, and not only thinking but wondering, ruminating, imagining her in bed with Michael, employing the most disgusting curiosity about something which had absolutely nothing to do with her! (As though one married people simply to go to bed with them!) After that bit of the evening, her mother could say nothing that did not have some sickening double meaning. Yes, she should go to bed early, she needed a good night’s sleep as tomorrow was going to be such a day. “You must be fresh for it.” Well, she had thought, when she had finally escaped to her room in Uncle Hugh’s house for the night, in twenty-four hours I shall be miles away from her. It will never have to be like this again.

  She had managed not to be alone with her father at all until the day of the wedding when he turned up just as she had finished dressing with a half-bottle of champagne. “I thought we might each have a glass,” he had said. “Dutch courage, don’t you know.” He looked very dashing in his morning dress with the pale grey silk tie and white rose in his buttonhole. By now she was feeling nervous, and the champagne seemed a good idea.

  He eased the cork out of the bottle and caught the fizz in one of the glasses. He had put them on the dressing table and now she saw him looking at her reflection in the mirror. When he saw that she saw, he looked away and filled up both the glasses.

  “Here you are, darling,” he said. “You can’t possibly know how much happiness I wish you.”

  There was a small silence while he handed her her glass. Then he said: “You look—most awfully pretty.” He sounded humble—almost shy.

  “Oh, Dad!” she said, and tried to smile, but her eyes pricked. Nothing more could dare to be said.

  “To my eldest unmarried daughter,” he said as he raised his glass. They both smiled at each other: the past lay between them like a knife.

  It was when she got back to Sussex that these scenes recurred—when she was alone, when she was not playing one of her parts.

  “Do you feel different being married?” Clary had asked the first day.

  “No, not especially,” she had answered—the lofty, older cousin.

  “Why not?”

  The simplicity of the question confounded her.

  “Why should I?”

  “Well—I mean, you’re not a virgin any more to start with. I don’t suppose you’d tell me what that’s like, would you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. I do see how writers get circumscribed by having to rely on direct experience nearly all the time. Or reading about things, which is not at all the same as someone telling you.”

  “You’re far too inquisitive, in a morbid way. A bit disgusting to boot,” she added.

  But Clary, having suffered countless accusations about her curiosity, had become adept at defending it.

  “It isn’t like that at all. It’s simply that if you are really interested in people and how they behave you get every sort of thing to be curious about. For instance—” But Louise had seen Zoë on her bicycle in the drive and had gone downstairs to meet her.

  “Honestly! I’m sick of people accusing me and then not listening to anything I say,” Clary grumbled later to Polly as they were waiting in the day nursery for Ellen’s kettle to boil so that they could fill their hot water bottles. “It isn�
��t just a question of whether she’s a virgin or not, I’m just as curious about prisoners, and nuns and royalty and childbirth and murder and things like that—anything that either hasn’t happened to me or couldn’t ever happen.”

  “Royalty’s the only one of them,” Polly pointed out: she was used to these discussions.

  “No—what about your favourite song? ‘I am so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.’”

  “I don’t know how fond of pleasure I am,” Polly said sadly. “We really don’t get enough of it to find out.”

  She had not wanted to announce her pregnancy at home but she felt so sick the first morning that she couldn’t get up for breakfast. Lydia was sent up to see why she hadn’t come down.

  “It’s nothing. I must have eaten something.”

  “Oh, poor you! It’s probably that horrible meat loaf we had last night for supper. Do you know what Neville thinks? He thinks Mrs. Cripps puts mice and hedgehogs in it. He thinks she might be a witch because of her black hair and her face is practically luminous in the dark. Even toads, he thought she might put—squashed, you know—he thinks that might be the jellyish bit you get on the outside—toads’ ooze—”

  “Oh, shut up, Lydia.”

  “Sorry. I was only trying to think what it could be. Shall I bring you up some tea?”

  “Thanks, that would be lovely.”

  But it was her mother who arrived with tea and toast, and she seemed to know at once without Louise saying a thing.

  “Oh, darling! How exciting! Does Michael know?”

  “Yes.”

  “He must be pleased.”

  “He is—very.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Dr. Carr is awfully good. Eat the toast, even if you don’t put anything on it. Toast and water biscuits are the thing for morning sickness. How long …?”

  About five weeks, she thought. It seemed like for ever.

  In the end she stayed nearly a month at home, by which time Dr. Carr had confirmed her pregnancy. Everybody assumed that she was delighted at the prospect. The only person she came near confiding in was Zoë. She was helping to put Juliet to bed. “You give her her supper while I clear up,” Zoë had said. They were alone in the nursery: Wills and Roly were being bathed by Ellen.

  Juliet sat in her high chair. She wanted to feed herself, which was a messy and inconclusive business. “No, Jule do it,” she repeated whenever Louise tried to take the laden spoon from her.

  “Goodness! She’ll need another bath.”

  “Oh, I’ll just sponge the worst bits off. One has to let them learn.”

  “I don’t know anything about babies.”

  Zoë looked at her quickly and waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t. She often found herself trying not to cry these days.

  “Listen,” Zoë said as she came across the room to sit at the table by Louise and the high chair, “neither did I. And it’s terrifying because everybody seems to assume that you do.”

  “And that you’re thrilled,” Louise said in a muffled voice.

  “Yes.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “Not the first time—no. And then everyone kept saying I should have another one and I didn’t want to.”

  “But you did.”

  “Not then, not immediately. Hang on, Jules. Let me clean you up a bit first.

  “But when I finally did have her—it was wonderful. It was—well, with Rupert gone, she just made all the difference. I had been dreading something happening to him so much, it seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen, and then it happened—but at the same time, there was Jules.”

  “Chockat!”

  “No. Onto your pot first.”

  But Jules did not agree with this. She lay on the floor, arched her back and set about a luxuriant tantrum.

  Louise watched while Zoë dealt with this. Finally, Jules was on her pot with a small piece of chocolate. “It usually turns out to be a compromise.”

  “Aunt Zoë—I—”

  “I’d much rather you dropped the Aunt. Sorry! What?”

  “I just wanted to say I hadn’t realized about—what an awful time you must have had.”

  “Why should you have? You were a child. And, anyway, it’s far harder for you. I didn’t start until I’d been married for about five years, and Rupert wasn’t in the war then. You’re doing it all at once.”

  In some ways this conversation was comforting; but in other ways not. Perhaps, like Zoë, she would feel quite differently about a baby once it was there: on the other hand, and for the first time, she came up against the dreadful prospect of Michael getting killed.

  A few evenings later when he rang her up, which he did from time to time, he told her that he could get away for a night and proposed coming to Sussex. “We’ve had a bit of engine trouble and so I’m leaving them to it for a day or two.”

  She felt light-hearted with excitement, everybody was very pleased for her and the whole family entered into preparations to welcome him. The Duchy procured a brace of pheasants for dinner; the Brig spent the morning choosing and decanting port; Lydia had a row with Polly about wearing their bridesmaids’ dresses for dinner (Polly thought it was unsuitable but Lydia, who had tried to wear hers for lessons, for tea on Sundays and sometimes secretly after her bath was determined). “It is perfectly the proper thing to wear for dinner,” she said, “and it will remind Michael of old times—his lovely wedding and all that.”

  “You won’t be at dinner,” Polly had said.

  “I shall! Louise! You’ll let me be, won’t you, as your sister?”

  But before Louise could reply, their mother had said she was afraid it was out of the question. There was not enough pheasant to go round: Aunt Dolly would be having a tray upstairs, and Aunt Rach had said that she found pheasant a wee bit indigestible and was going to stick to veg.

  “Couldn’t I be at dinner and have a boiled egg?”

  “No, you can’t. Miss Milliment is having hers on a tray in the nursery. You may have yours with her.”

  “Thanks very bloody much.”

  “That’ll do, Lydia. I’ve told you not to use that word.”

  “It’ll only be an ordinary old dinner,” Clary said when Villy had left the room.

  “It wouldn’t be ordinary to me. I don’t have dinners as a rule. I seem to be in a class by myself for misfortune. It doesn’t seem to have struck them that we might all get bombed before I reach the age to have any privileges at all. I shall have had a completely wasted life.”

  Clary and Polly exchanged weary, consciously adult glances but then made soothing noises of comfort and commiseration. But Louise had recognized the faint irritation in her mother’s voice and found herself in sympathy. Lydia was only trying to get the rules changed: all children did that—why, even she had done the same thing ages ago. Being at home certainly made her feel older although not the same age as anyone else in the family.

  Michael arrived that evening by train, and she went to meet him with Tonbridge who now called her “Madam.” He drove her so slowly to Battle that she thought they would be late, but they weren’t. She had only to stand a minute at the door of the ticket office when the train shuffled in. Although it was dark, small chinks and streaks of dark yellow light were emitted by the train as doors opened and some passengers twitched aside the blackout in a hopeless attempt to see where they had arrived. Stations had been without names for so long that most people were used to it, and simply counted the number of stops, but there were always a few anxious strangers.

  “Fancy seeing you here!”

  “Oh—I just thought—if I meet enough trains, I’m bound to know someone getting off one of them.”

  He put his free arm round her and gave her a hug before a kiss. “I’m not ’arf glad to see you. How’s His Nibs?”

  “Who?”

  “Our babe.”

  “Fine.”

  �
��Darling girl! Have I missed you!”

  The feeling of excitement and happiness came back. He was wearing his greatcoat that smelled faintly of diesel oil and salt and camphor with the collar turned up round his neck; the badge on his cap glinted slightly in the darkness when he turned his head towards her. They sat, holding hands, and made grown-up conversation for the benefit of Tonbridge.

  “News is good, isn’t it? Good old Monty.”

  “Do you think we’re actually winning the war?”

  “Well,” he said, “it would seem that the tide is turning. The Russians are holding on in Stalingrad. North Africa is definitely our biggest victory so far. But we’ve still got a long way to go.”

  “What’s wrong with your ship?”

  “We’ve been having trouble with the port engine. Each time they think they’ve got it right and then it packs up again. So now they’re having a really serious overhaul. There have been other things, of course. But the crew is shaking down nicely. Little Turner packed us some cheese for you, it’s in my case. I’ve scrounged a tin of butter as well. So I hope I’ll be popular.”

  “You would be, anyway,” she said. “They’re all longing to see you. Lydia wanted to wear her bridesmaid’s dress in your honour. Do you think you could draw Juliet? It would be so lovely for Zoë.”

  “I might at that. Not easy because at that age they don’t keep still. You’re my best sitter, darling. Which was Juliet?”

  “My smallest cousin.”

  “She was ravishing. I’ll have a go. Haven’t got very much time, though.”

  “When do you have to go back?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid.”

  What he did not tell her then, what only came out at dinner—it seemed to her almost by accident—was that he wasn’t going back to the ship the next day, he was going to go on a bombing raid over Germany. “They’re going to pick me up at Lympne, which seems to be the nearest airfield to you, but it’s devilish small for a Stirling. However, they say they can just about manage it. That would be super,” he said when Villy offered to drive him there. “It would be lovely to have a family send-off.”