The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  “Why on earth are you going in a bomber? They haven’t told you to, have they?”

  “No. I just thought it might be fun. And I’m rather interested in camouflage at the moment. Said it would be useful to me to make the trip. And they agreed.”

  Pride forbade her letting the family know that this was news to her so she was silent. But once they were on their own, undressing for bed, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to tell you. I have.”

  “I can’t think why you want to do that. You might—you might get—”

  “No, darling, that’s very unlikely. Where’s the bathroom, darling? I’ve rather lost my bearings.”

  She told him and he went. Alone, remnants of news bulletins kept bombarding her: “Three of our aircraft missing”; “Two of our bombers failed to return.” He was mad to go if he didn’t have to; of course it was dangerous. It wasn’t fair that he should risk his life—on purpose, as it were—when he had married her and was so keen on having a family.

  “Does Zee know?” she asked when he returned. (That might stop him: she was sure Zee would be against it.)

  “Yes. Of course she doesn’t like the idea any more than you do, darling, she loves me too, you know. But she just put her arms round me and gave me a hug and said, ‘You must do what you want.’

  “Actually,” he said, smiling at the recollection of it, “she said, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.’ She is amazing—she really is.”

  “You saw her last night? Did she come to Cowes, then?”

  “No. She came up to London for the night. There was a play of Jack’s she wanted to see.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack Priestley. So we went to that. Jolly good it was. We both thought of you and how much you would have enjoyed it.”

  It was all too much. He had two—no, three nights’ leave and he had chosen to spend the first with his mother and the third on a bombing raid over Germany. She burst into tears.

  “Now, darling,” he said, “you mustn’t upset yourself. You really mustn’t. This is war, you know. I shall have to do all kinds of things that involve a certain amount of danger, that’s what war is. You must learn to be brave.”

  The next morning he spent half of it drawing Juliet, and the other half teaching her a code so that if he was taken prisoner he could send messages about his escape plans in apparently innocuous letters to her. He wrote out a specimen of the code in his beautiful clear writing and told her to lock it up somewhere safe. “Unless you can memorize it,” he said. “That would be best, of course.”

  Then there was lunch—fricassé of rabbit and gooseberry fool—but she found it difficult to eat anything, listening dumbly to the usual family discussion about who was to come on the excursion to the airfield. Lydia was determined to go and Wills wanted to see the aeroplane, but as she would not have been alone with him in any case, she did not very much care. Michael had brought some petrol coupons with him (he must have planned to get the lift, she thought); it seemed as though all of his arrangements about life were unknown to her until they happened. She sat in the back of the car with him with the children wriggling and chattering in front. She had become very passive, and simply concurred in everything, but inside she felt cold and heavy with fear. In an hour, she thought, he would be gone, and she might never see him again, and he seemed unaware, unconscious of what this meant. To spend your last hour with someone who was map-reading, while “I spy with my little eye” went on in the front of the car seemed bizarre.

  Eventually they reached the windswept but bright green grass runway, and everybody got out. It was raining, not hard but steadily. Michael was saluted by a very young man in RAF uniform and they were conducted to the hut, which smelled strongly of the paraffin stove that stopped it being entirely cold.

  Here was an officer who said he was the station commander, adding that he was amazed that a Stirling was going to land there: “I must say I rather doubt whether it can.”

  For a moment she imagined it falling—swooping away, and not managing to pick up Michael, after all. But a second later the throbbing sound of the engines could be heard and, surprisingly soon, there it was. It looked enormous. It did one circuit over them and then came in at the far end of the runway, finally stopping right at the other end, with its blunt nose almost in a hedge.

  “Right,” he said, “here we go. I mustn’t keep them waiting.” He kissed his mother-in-law affectionately, bent down and kissed Lydia on the cheek and she blinked and went pink, nodded to Wills who was transfixed by the Stirling and finally turned to her, put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a kiss on her mouth of the kind that is almost over before it has begun. “Keep your pecker up, my darling,” he said. “I’ll ring some time tomorrow. Promise.”

  Her mother took the two children to the car: Wills had broken out into a roar of despair when he realized that he was not going to get into the aeroplane. She stood and watched him climb up into the bomber, watched them pull the narrow stairway up into it after him, watched the door, or hatch, or whatever it was, slam shut removing him from sight, watched the huge unwieldy plane turn and then taxi away down the runway.

  “The wind’s east,” the station commander said. “They’ll go out to sea and then turn and come back over us. You can wave to them then.”

  So she waited a few minutes to do that, wondering whether he could see her, whether even if he could see her, he would be looking.

  Her mother was very kind to her in just the right way: she made it clear that she thought it was hard, but she did not go on about it.

  Lydia wanted to go and have tea in a tea-shop in Hastings, “As we’ve come all this way. To make it a proper treat.”

  Villy turned to Louise who was sitting in front beside her. “Do you want to do that, darling?”

  She shook her head. As so often nowadays, she was perilously near tears.

  “We’ll go home, then.”

  They drove home in the dusk, and that evening she stayed with the family to listen to the nine o’clock news. “French fleet has been scuttled by their crews in Toulon harbour,” it began, but eventually it got to heavy raids having been carried out on Kiel and Cologne the previous night. Then she realized that she wouldn’t know anything about the raid Michael was on until he rang up. So the aircraft that were being reported missing could have nothing to do with him. Soon, as she was unable to bear the atmosphere of covert sympathy, she escaped to bed where she had what her family would have called a good cry. She had begun to be afraid that Michael did not love her, and that he would be killed.

  PART

  TWO

  The Family

  New Year, 1943

  “But Happy New Year all the same.”

  There was such a silence, that she said, “Darling, you know how disappointed I am. Or perhaps you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “Well, I am. But I simply can’t abandon poor old Dolly with nobody to look after her.”

  Nobody! Sid thought. The house is chock-a-block with people and servants. What does she mean “nobody”? Aloud, she said, “I suppose if I broke my leg, you’d come and look after me?”

  “Darling! You know I would.” Irony was not part of Rachel’s make-up. The eager sweetness of this response brought tears of love and resentment to her eyes. The little respite—it was hardly even a holiday—of Rachel’s spending two nights with her in London was foiled, like so many other anxious, hopeful plans that they made these days. Usually it was the Brig, the old despot, who frustrated them; now it was Dolly with flu. It could easily have been the Duchy. There would always be some old person for Rachel to look after, an endless succession of them, until we too are old …

  “You can’t possibly come down?”

  “You know perfectly well I’m on call. I didn’t do Christmas so I have to do New Year’s Eve.”

  “All right, darling. I quite understand. I’ll be up at the end of next
week, anyway.”

  “You always say things like that.”

  “Do I? What I meant was, I have to go to the dentist. I think I’ve got that abscess coming back on a tooth. So I’ve made an appointment.”

  “Is it hurting?”

  “Off and on. It’s nothing to worry about. Aspirin keeps it at bay. I must go, I’m afraid. Villy is waiting for the phone. Happy New Year again. Why don’t you ring up that poor girl and have her to supper?”

  When she had rung off, Sid thought, why not? She was so fed up and used to being disappointed, so tired from endless hopes being frustrated and deferred, so exhausted by the chronic general jealousy that Rachel’s, in her view, excessive unselfishness so constantly presented—which always brought with it the nagging fear that her importance to Rachel was waning or had never really existed in the first place—that the idea of spending the evening with someone who clearly worshipped her was a kind of balm. Somebody, at least, cared to be with her, would understand if she was suddenly called out to the ambulance station, would wait until she returned and would certainly appreciate the modest feast that she had collected to enjoy with Rachel and that she certainly would not have had the heart to eat alone. All the same, she felt unsure about whether ringing Thelma would prove to be a good thing. It was all very well to give her free violin lessons—that much she felt she owed the poor little thing. And taking her to the odd concert had also seemed appropriately kind. But asking her to supper would place the relationship on a different footing and it might not be one that she would feel able to sustain. She felt sorry for Thelma—how could one not? Thelma’s parents had both been killed: her father on a North Atlantic convoy, her mother in an air raid on Coventry. She seemed without any other family, and struggled to live on a succession of ill-paid part-time jobs. Sid had been introduced to her by the forcefully kind lady who ran canteens for various ambulance stations. This girl had come to clean her house, she had said but, really, she was a very gifted musician. Mrs. Davenport, returning to her house unexpectedly, had caught her playing the piano quite amazingly well. Of course she didn’t know anything about music, but she could tell instantly this girl had a gift … And the girl had told her that the piano was not really her instrument—she considered herself to be a violinist.

  Of course, she had agreed to hear the girl, whose musical talent proved to be nothing remarkable. But she had seemed so willing, so eager to learn and her sense of identity so clearly rested upon the idea of being a professional musician, that Sid, who missed teaching more than she had realized, took her on. Thelma had been grateful—extravagantly, pathetically so. Sid was constantly getting little gifts—bunches of violets, bags of sweets, packets of cigarettes and, with them, a stream of cards. She also worked exceedingly hard at her violin practice between the weekly lessons. When Rachel’s niece got married and Sid had gone to the wedding, Thelma produced a quantity of newspaper cuttings about the event that Sid, whose interest in it had been chiefly centred upon the pleasure of seeing Rachel, had sent on to her: “From my indefatigable little pupil,” she had written. “But I dare say somebody in the family might like to see them.” Of course she felt sorry for Thelma, but not perhaps quite sorry enough to spend New Year’s Eve with her. No, she would dine alone.

  Just as she had decided this, the telephone rang and it was Thelma asking if she might bring a small New Year’s gift? In seconds, Sid found that she had not only invited her to supper, she had suggested that if they were to see in the New Year, Thelma had better bring things for the night. As Thelma lived in a room near Waterloo and could not possibly have afforded a cab home, this seemed a small practical kindness. “What Rachel would certainly have done,” she said to herself. She felt tired and dispirited, selfish and resentful, and not disposed towards festivity of any kind. She would be forty-four when the New Year was a week old and felt as though she would never stop living from hand to mouth with not very much in her hand.

  “Darling, you shouldn’t say that. It’s not going to be New Year for another four hours at least.”

  “I shall probably say it every time I have a drink. Which tonight will be rather often.”

  “Bad week?”

  “A sodding awful week.”

  “Hugh again?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know what’s got into the old boy. He’s always been as stubborn as a mule, but these days, whatever I say, he deliberately takes the opposite view. And then sticks to it. Nothing will shift him.”

  Before Diana could reply, wails broke out from upstairs.

  “I’ll have to go up. Darling, just relax. Have another whisky. I might be some time getting him off. Have a little snooze: there’s plenty of time before dinner. Put another log on the fire, darling, would you?”

  The logs were in a large rush basket by the enormous open fireplace. He hoisted himself out of his chair with caution; the cottage was full of beams and the last thing he wanted was a crack on the head. She had made the place very cosy: the room, which occupied nearly all of the ground floor, was sitting and dining room combined; there was a tiny kitchen which contained a Raeburn stove, a sink and a draining board, and a door that opened into an icy larder. The main room was crowded with a sofa and two armchairs, all rather battered, a scrubbed table which was set for dinner, a dresser on which the china was kept and at the far end, near the front door in front of which an old carpet had been hung to exclude the worst draughts, a play pen with rag books, bricks and several stuffed animals who lounged with a kind of stoic abandon against its bars. Jamie’s tricycle was parked at that end of the room, together with his gum boots. Apart from the fire, the room was lit by a large oil lamp that stood on the dresser, further crowding the room with pools of mellow gold and mysterious twilight angles of shadow. In the daytime, its small, heavily recessed windows made the room rather dark; at night, it came into its own. It was good to be here, he thought. At home there would be Hugh, and either we’d have another row, or we’d bottle everything up for the weekend.

  He poured himself another drink. He didn’t feel like dropping off; he wanted to go through the whole thing on his own, when he could perhaps manage not to feel quite so angry that it clouded his judgement. Right. They had taken long enough to pay the compensation for the war damage to the wharf: there had been months of assessments, overseeing stock books, paperwork of every imaginable kind, but in the end they had paid—a hundred per cent both for repair of the property and the value of the stock held there. That had seemed fine. But then, out of the blue, at the end of that tax year, the firm had been faced with excess profits tax on all of the stock, as though they’d sold it, which meant, in effect, they were not getting its value at all. They’d made the tax allowable profit on timber that had been sold, but this was stock, worth the best part of two hundred thousand pounds: paying EPT on that effectively meant that it couldn’t be replaced on the money left. He was so damned angry that he’d gone to lawyers at once, although Hugh had said there was no point. They would simply have to pay it, he said—again and again. The lawyer had been pretty feeble: said that if they fought it, it would undoubtedly have to go as far as the Lords since it would be setting a precedent or, at best, attempting to stop one being set. He’d talked to the Old Man, who had suggested they speak to a friend of his in the Board of Trade. “Find out whether this has been happening a lot, or whether we’re a one-off case,” he had said. The Old Man’s friend had said, of course, that it wasn’t really his department, but had also more or less intimated that he thought they ought to grin and bear it. Hugh had been gloomily triumphant. “Told you it wasn’t the slightest use, simply a waste of time and money,” he had said. But he felt that there was too much at stake for them to take it lying down. That money represented their trading future and, given that hardwoods were rising in price steadily, by the time they came to renew stock they would anyway be unable to match the stuff that had been destroyed in the bombing. The EPT was the last straw. So, this morning he had had one more go at Hugh about
fighting the whole thing. It was not only their money, he had said, there was also the principle: it was patently unjust for the Government to turn the compensation for damaged stock into some sort of trumped-up profit, to treat it as a sale. Hugh had seemed to agree with this, but then he had reverted to the high costs of employing the right kind of lawyers to act for them, the enormous waste of time, the fact that they were understaffed and that this would be a disruption lasting for months, “on top of which,” he had finished, “we have absolutely no guarantee of success. We could simply be even more out of pocket and have made fools of ourselves.”

  Hugh had been sitting at his desk when he said this, playing with a paperweight, picking it up and dropping it from the height of an inch or so back onto his desk. And then, and this is what had made Edward see red, he had added, “In any case, I’ve had another talk with the Old Man, and he’s dead against it. So it’s two against one, I’m afraid.”

  “He wasn’t against it before!”

  “Well, he is now.”

  “You know perfectly well you’ve put the case in such a way to him as to make him agree with you.”

  “I told him what I thought, naturally.”

  “It seems to be the greatest possible pity that you should see fit to talk to him behind my back.”

  “Does it? I thought you were rather in favour of doing things behind people’s backs.”

  This oblique, but unmistakable reference to Diana enraged him so much that he had got to his feet and left Hugh’s office, slamming the door behind him. Damned cheek! Ever since he’d had that awful conversation with Hugh who had almost persuaded him to ditch Diana, and then, for obvious reasons, he hadn’t, there had been a smouldering disapproval coming from Hugh that he’d found it very difficult to stand. Because, of course, from a conventional point of view, Hugh was right. But he seemed to take no account of feelings—either his or Diana’s. He was in love with her; she had had his child; he couldn’t abandon her now. He couldn’t think beyond now about that. But Hugh had no right to bring that into a discussion, or argument, about business. There he was indisputably right. Not for the first time, he wished old Rupe was with them, but then, and also not for the first time, he remembered that Rupe would agree with enthusiastic sympathy with whoever was talking to him. I’ll have to tackle the Old Man, he thought. He had to go back anyway, tomorrow, had only wangled this night off by saying there was an RAF do that he had been invited to and couldn’t refuse. It was a good thing, really, that Diana had finally decided against living in London. This cottage, half-way between the wharf and Sussex, had been a far better idea, although he supposed it must be a bit lonely for her at times. But she had chosen it, or rather, one of Angus’s rich friends had offered it to her for almost nothing; it had been a keeper’s cottage on his family’s estate. God, what a mess everything is, though, he thought. He didn’t want to quarrel with Hugh; he loved the old boy, and he knew, he felt, better than anyone, how hard Sybil’s death had hit him. The last time he had felt really close to Hugh was when he had taken him away afterwards. God knows why he had chosen Westmorland. He thought it ought to be somewhere that they had never been to before, but he hadn’t reckoned on the weather. It had rained practically every day. They had gone for long wet walks taking packed lunches from the small hotel; played darts in the evenings, listened to the news on the radio in the bar, had a game of chess and gone to bed early, although it was clear that Hugh was not sleeping much. To begin with he had seemed stunned, was very silent, although from time to time he would say things like “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for seeing me through this bit of it,” and then his eyes would fill with tears and he would stop. Then, gradually, he began to talk about Sybil, despairing, feverish ruminations about whether she could have been saved: if they had found out about the cancer earlier, if she had told him when she began to feel ill, if they had operated sooner … “In the end, you know, we talked about it,” he said. “I discovered that she had known how ill she was for months. She was very sick one night; she made herself eat an ordinary dinner to please me. She was very upset because she said she hated me having to clear it all up: I told her that being able to do anything for her was a joy, a blessing, some kind of relief, and then when I had got her a clean nightdress and was helping her get into it, she told me that she knew she was dying, and she knew I knew. ‘I want to be able to say anything to you,’ she said, ‘because soon I won’t be able to say anything at all.’”