But sometimes, as now, sitting in bed with the eiderdown round her shoulders, what she had so briefly felt about that second expression of Archie’s recurred and the humiliation flooded her like a blush. If he ever started to feel sorry for her it would be the end of everything. “It would be an impertinence so profound that I should never recover from it,” she wrote in her journal before she could stop herself, and then read it with dismay. She certainly didn’t want Dad to read that because it really didn’t go with anything else she had written; on the other hand, it did seem to her rather an interesting and mature remark and one that she did not feel should be lightly jettisoned. In the end, she rubbed and then crossed it out most thoroughly, and then wrote it in the notebook that Poll had given her for Christmas to write out ideas for books.
The Family
Summer, 1943
Having something to look forward to only served to emphasize the featureless desert that she felt her life had become, and having lunch with her brother-in-law which would once have been nothing more than a mild—a very mild—diversion, now assumed the proportions of adventure. She decided that she would catch an early train and go to Mr. Bayley in Brook Street to have her hair cut, then she would go to Liberty’s where Zoë had recently bought a very pretty striped cotton bedspread with which she had made both herself and Juliet frocks. No coupons were required for bed linen or furnishing materials, but it was not easy to find anything suitable. She had decided not to stay the night: ever since that ghastly dinner party with Hermione that Edward had clean forgotten about, she had hated his dreary little flat. She couldn’t think why he kept it. It was a mean, modern, cramped sort of place; its décor reminded her of the captain’s cabin in a battleship (although why on earth she should make that comparison she could not imagine—she had never been in any captain’s cabin anywhere). Anyway, the paint was all sleek greys, the carpets, fitted, were the colour and texture of porridge. The minimal furniture was “modern,” that is to say its designer had been keen on its looking unusual at all costs. The drawers had no handles, but declivities so shallow that it was nearly impossible to get the purchase to open them; the taps, likewise, had no graspable spigot, rather a moulded top that eluded spiral pressure. Although Edward had imported a larger bed in place of the single divan, it still wasn’t large enough for both of them; it meant that they had to sleep touching each other all night, something she had never liked very much. Anyway, Edward was away—on a visit to Southampton where they had recently bought a wharf—so there was not much point in her staying up. None the less, she had been, she was, looking forward to getting away from Home Place just for the inside of a day. Although the house was full of people she felt isolated. She missed Sybil far more than she had thought she would; she missed Rupert, who, like the rest of the family, she privately thought dead; she missed her pre-war London life, even though at the time she had thought it dull; she even missed her sister Jessica and the long summer visits she had made when she had been poorer and somehow more accessible than she ever seemed to be now.
On the whole there was not much time for nostalgia or introspection. McAlpine’s arthritis meant that not only was the garden far too much for him, but also that his temper had become such that no boy recruited from the dwindling supply available stayed longer than a few weeks. Last summer she had taught herself to use a scythe and cut all of the orchard, which had gained his grudging respect. “I’ve seen worse,” he had remarked. After this, she spent at least two afternoons a week on outside maintenance: she had taught herself to prune the fruit trees; she sanded and repainted one of the greenhouses; and, of course, on wet days there was always wood to be sawn and stacked. “You must not exhaust yourself,” the Duchy had said, but that was exactly what she had wanted to do, the whole of last year ever since last spring which now seemed such a very long time ago. But apart from—that (she now never allowed herself to mention his name), last year had been hard in other ways. After the row with Edward about his forgetting Hermoine’s party during which she had heard herself make the classic denunciation of his general lack of concern, he had spent an unusually long time making love to her, and she had been so wrought up and then exhausted by pretending to enjoy it that it was not until the next morning that she remembered she had taken no precautions. So when, the following month, she missed her period she naturally thought herself pregnant, and this time, unlike with Roly, she actually felt glad at the prospect. It would be her last baby, she would be able to share her pregnancy with Louise who was also in the family way. But when she told Edward she sensed that he was not wholly enthusiastic, although he wouldn’t voice any objection. “Good Lord! I don’t know … Do you really think you should …” were some of the things he said. When pressed, he had eventually said that of course he was pleased, it was only that he wondered if perhaps she wasn’t getting on a bit for having another baby. Of course she would be if it was her first, she had answered, but she was perfectly healthy, there was really no reason why she shouldn’t … She toyed with the idea of going to London to see Dr. Ballater, but in the end she went to Dr. Carr. She went to his consulting room in his house, because she didn’t want to tell the family anything until she was absolutely sure, but by now it was the second month and she felt she knew. “I’m sure I am,” she had said to Dr. Carr, “I just wanted to confirm it with you.”
He had given her a sharp look from under his rather shaggy eyebrows and remarked that it was a bit early to be sure …
After he had examined her and asked her a good many questions, he had said that although it might not be to her liking, he thought it far more probable that she was embarking upon the menopause than that she was pregnant. He could be wrong, he added, but it was clear that he did not think so.
“After all, Mrs. Cazalet, you are forty-seven, you have four fine children as it is. Don’t you think, in any case, it’s a wee bit late to start again?”
“Surely it’s too early for all that!” She was aghast at the idea.
“People vary about it. You tell me that you started menstruation late, and the later starters are usually earlier to finish.”
She felt herself flushing; she found it embarrassing even to hear any words connected with the whole revolting business. He mistook her revulsion for disappointment and talked encouragingly about her prospect of becoming a grandmother (Louise had twice been to see him). “You are young enough to get the full benefit of grandchildren,” he had said, but Villy had always regarded comfort as a means of minimizing the authenticity of her distress in the first place and was therefore hostile, or at least impervious to it.
Of course, this visit was shortly followed by incontrovertible evidence that she was not pregnant, and she spent the rest of the winter much depressed. Edward’s relief at the news had irritated her and she had several times said how pleased he must be, but she did not mention the disgusting alternative.
One way and another it was good to have the small excursion to look forward to. She would go and see Louise too, of course, who was still in the nursing home where she had had her baby the previous week. Michael had telephoned the news—he had managed to get a few days’ leave—and she had offered to go up at once, but he had said much better to wait until his leave was up and Louise might be feeling lonely. And then Raymond had rung her. It was a very bad line and he sounded both portentous and faint. He would so very much like to see her, he said twice: she was the only person who, he felt, might be able to give him advice … This remark with its doubled-edged attractions—her vanity was soothed, her curiosity aroused—settled the matter: she had agreed to meet him at the Arts Theatre Club in Great Newport Street at a quarter to one. She put on last year’s blue suit with the chiffon blouse (it was quite sunny and warm) and caught the train.
She was early and he had not arrived, so she sat in the densely populated and very small dusky area that was half passage, half room on the ground floor and watched people booking theatre tickets and meeting each other for lunch, until Ra
ymond suddenly loomed beside her, bending down to present her with his huge pale face that gleamed almost phosphorescent in the gloom.
“My dear! My train was late. Awfully sorry.” His cheek was damp, his moustache like thistles. He took her arm. “Shall we go straight up? Have a drink and all that?”
He led the way to the large pleasant dining room.
“A table for two—name of Castle,” he said in the tone of elaborate courtesy he reserved for what he considered to be his inferiors. It was one of the things she had not noticed before, but now recognized as his habit.
“And we should like to order drinks immediately—if you would be so kind.”
The drinks arrived, he offered her a cigarette and began laboriously enquiring after the health of everyone in the family, receiving her answers as though they were exactly what he expected, and she began to see that he was nervous.
“I suppose it is no use asking you anything about your work,” she said.
“Fraid not. Of course one likes to feel useful—to have found some sort of niche. And I do feel that it is up to somebody in my family to make some contribution to the war effort.”
“Oh, Raymond! Christopher is working for a farmer and, goodness knows, we need food grown here, and Nora, they say, is a simply wonderful nurse, and hasn’t Angela moved from the BBC to the Ministry of Information? And, after all, Judy is just a child. And—” But here she came to an end. She could not honestly think of anything useful that Jessica was doing, or ever had done, and this was when she realized that she was not being mentioned.
“And as for Jessica,” he said as though he had heard her thoughts, “her contribution seems to be adultery.” There was a short silence: the word lay like a scorpion on the table between them.
Then he said, “For one awful moment I thought that perhaps you might have known. That everyone knew excepting me. But you didn’t, did you?”
No, she said, she didn’t. She was so shocked—she had always assumed that she and Jessica felt the same about things like that—that although her mind seethed with questions, each one on its own seemed too trivial to voice.
“Are you sure?” she eventually managed to ask.
“Dead sure.” And then he began answering the questions without her having to ask a single one.
He’d known for nearly a month now. When he’d first found out, his instinct had been to go and confront her at once, but he’d not dared to do that. “I wanted to kill her,” he said, “I was honestly afraid of what I might do. She’s been lying to me so much, you see. I felt such a fool. Also, there were some things I didn’t want to know. Supposing she thought she was in love with the bastard, for instance, or supposing she wasn’t—it had just been a roll in the hay—I didn’t know which would make me feel worse. Then I discovered that it had been going on for quite a long time—”
“How long?”
“Oh, well over a year. I don’t know—it could be much longer. She got to know him when we were still at Frensham. Of course, you know who it is by now, don’t you?”
She began to say no, she didn’t, but before the words were out of her mouth a horrible thought assailed her, a doubt, suspicion that in a second congealed to sickening certainty.
“Oh, no!”
“My dear! I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you, although I quite understand your feelings. It is shocking. A decently brought-up woman who has been married for twenty-seven years—happily married I always thought …”
She drank some water while he droned on and his face, which had briefly obscured to a dizzy blur, slipped jerkily back into focus. So, too, did all kinds of small matters—things said, or not said, the way Jessica never asked her to stay, did not seem to want to come to Home Place, had not wanted Louise to stay with her and then that curious time when she had dropped in at St. John’s Wood and Jessica had behaved so oddly …
He was on to what he thought of Clutterworth now—suddenly he seemed unable to stop repeating his name. “If Mr. Clutterworth thinks that being a musician entitles him to behave in this manner … and, what is more, if Mr. Clutterworth thinks he can get away with it, Mr. Laurence Clutterworth is in for a serious shock. I’ve half a mind to get in touch with that wretched wife of his to see if she knows what is going on …”
If it has been going on for over a year, I was not even his first choice, she thought, as the humiliation she had thought buried from that ghastly evening in Soho came flooding back. Oh, God! Supposing he told her about it afterwards!
But there was worse to come.
“Tell me,” he said, leaning over the table towards her. “Tell me, how on earth can any decent woman—I nearly said lady—think for a moment of falling in love with a greasy little worm like that? Let alone …” Here his complexion became suffused with embarrassment. “Let alone contemplating getting—physically involved with such a creature? Can you at all understand it? I mean, am I being obtuse, or what?”
Fortunately, he did not seem to expect an answer, was so immersed in angry rumination that any question was rhetorical: all she had to do, she thought, was sit and endure the floodgates of his rage and shock—for beyond all his clumsy, cliché-ridden language she could sense, as her Red Cross experience had taught her, that he was in shock—until somehow lunch would be over. She stopped trying to eat, lit a cigarette, stared at her plate and tried to let the ultimate humiliation of hearing somebody who she at least thought she had loved being described in terms that were compounded of coarseness and brutal reality wash over her. This numb, mindless reverie came abruptly to an end because he seemed to be asking something …
“… what you think I should do?”
“Do? What do you mean?”
“I mean, about talking to her. I must confess that I really don’t know what would be the best way to tackle it.”
She looked at him in astonishment. His anger seemed to have evaporated; he had now a nervously furtive, conciliatory air. Before she could reply, he exclaimed, with wholly unconvincing spontaneity: “I know! Well, that is, if you feel you could … Have a word with her?”
He stuck at it throughout all protestations: what should she say? What did he want her to say? What, in fact, did he want? He thought she might find out what Jessica really felt—perhaps she might even talk to the feller’s wife—get her to remove him from the scene or something. Beneath all the earlier bombast of which there was now no sign, she recognized that he was anxious, craven, and very much afraid. In the end, and in order to escape, she said she would have to think about it, and he wrote out his address and telephone number at Woodstock so that she could get in touch with him. By the time they parted outside the Arts Theatre Club it was four o’clock and she had to run to Charing Cross to catch her train.
Neville and Lydia, who had most mistakenly complained of not having anything to do, had been sent to fill up the drinking trough for the horses in the field. This entailed filling two buckets, one each, from the hose outside the stables and staggering through the arch in the wall, along the narrow cinder path past the potting shed, the compost heap and the broken-down kennel, along a grassy track that had huge sunbaked ruts in it to the trough just inside the gate that led to the horses’ field: it was a long walk. They had done four journeys and the trough was still only half full.
“It’s partly because Marigold is drinking it all up behind our backs,” Neville complained.
They had had their usual, almost mechanical grumble about the task immediately after they had been told to do it—gone through the unfairness of being made to work in their holidays, especially on such a hot afternoon when nobody else was, they bet. They went contemptuously through the grown-ups’ indolent and paltry activities: the Duchy machining, Aunt Zoë reading to ill people at the nursing home, Aunt Rachel sewing, Aunt Dolly (Bully) having a rest—they rolled their eyes at each other in a paroxysm of sarcastic amusement—Aunt Villy off in the car somewhere to fetch something or other … “They’re all sitting down,” Neville said.
“Hardly exhausting, my dear,” Lydia agreed. “Why doesn’t Mr. Wren do this? Wait for me, I’ve got to change arms.”
“He doesn’t do anything except chop a tiny bit of wood and go to the pub in the evenings. Tonbridge has to fetch him home sometimes because he can’t walk properly.”
“He’s intoxicated with drink,” Lydia said.
“But what does he do all day? I think we ought to find out.”
“Oh, Nev! He can be quite frightening—especially if you wake him when he’s asleep.”
“Well, he can’t run as fast as we can on his little spindly legs.”
They had reached the field again. The old chestnut was drinking from the trough. She put up her head suddenly and knocked Lydia’s bucket over so that the water ran into the hard-backed ground and disappeared at once.
“Oh, God!”
“You should have got her head out of the way first. We shall have to do this practically the whole afternoon and you’ll have to do an extra one.”
“I might not have to.”
“We’ll see,” Neville said in Ellen’s voice.
They had begun trailing back, easier with empty buckets, and they were free to notice other things; the old buddleia by the kitchen garden gate, for instance, that was swarming with butterflies; Flossy, asleep on a most unsuitably narrow piece of wall with her tail hanging down, “like the Speckled Band,” Neville said—he had become very keen on Sherlock Holmes. When, at last, they got back to the stable door with the hose that had been wired onto the tap beside it, they both simply went and sat on the mounting block for a rest.
“Well, this afternoon settles one thing. When I’m grown-up I shall be a freelance.”
“What’s that?”
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 120
