“Did it hurt frightfully?” Stella had asked, and she had been able to say yes, it did. Then it was time to feed the baby, and in the middle of that Michael arrived. She had the feeling, during that weekend, that although there was mutual goodwill, Michael and Stella did not really have anything in common excepting herself. He rang his mother the first evening and talked to her for a long time. “Mummy is longing for you to bring Sebastian down to Hatton,” he said in bed that night. “I could take you down tomorrow. If Stella didn’t mind.”
She said she couldn’t possibly leave the new house so soon; she must get things straight, and Mrs. Corcoran was not staying much longer; she couldn’t leave the house empty. So it had been agreed to wait a month, which was now over, and here she was.
The core of the trouble was that while everybody at Hatton—beginning with Zee and Pete and going on to the servants, which even included Crawley the chauffeur and Bateson the gardener—all adored baby Sebastian, she, his mother, who was supposed to be the most besotted was nothing of the kind. Now, from having thought that she wanted children but not until she had got more used to being married, she had reached the conclusion that she should never have had a child at all, and her worthlessness in this respect weighed more and more heavily upon her. She felt guilty, ashamed and sometimes actually wicked. Alone with him, she did make efforts to forge some kind of link between them, but he seemed to be in the conspiracy: he plainly did not like her to kiss or hug him, and when she talked to him he simply regarded her with a kind of remote indifference. He seemed to know that she was a bad mother: she supposed that one of his earliest memories might be of his mother apologizing to him. So she spent the days acting the part expected of her and the nights—early mornings—struggling with her miserable confusion.
It was Friday, which meant that guests would be coming for the weekend. An endless stream of people came to Hatton; for lunch, for dinner and the night, for bits of leave, or short respites from London. Many of them were old and distinguished, a good many were young and promising, practically all were male. Zee seemed effortlessly to collect men around her, and by blandly ignoring that many of them were married usually and mysteriously seemed to get them to visit on their own. A good proportion of the older ones had been in love with her at one time or another—for all Louise knew they might still be in her thrall.
Everybody was expected to perform—to play, to sing, to act in charades or Dumb Crambo or, failing any of that, to tell of the extraordinary and entertaining things that had happened to them (this last was on the whole the prerogative of the very old and distinguished who had lived long enough, Louise thought, for enough of that sort of thing to have happened to them). People arriving for their first visit, usually the younger guests, were often rather silent, but Zee had a way of making them feel at their ease and at the same time particularly interesting, and they soon learned to play the games, laugh at the jokes, and generally enter into the rarified spirit of the place. The fact that she shone at the acting games told in her favour: this was a good thing, because—and it had only been apparent to her on this visit and then when Michael had left—there were other things that she felt were chalked up against her. Their arrival here, for instance. They had come down by train, as Michael did not have enough petrol to drive them, and the train had been interminably delayed because of repairs to the track. Sebastian had become hungry, was not appeased by water in a bottle, so in the end, in spite of a carriage full of people, she fed him. When this was announced at Hatton (by Michael who thought it all rather daring and delightful), it was clear that Zee thought nothing of the kind. “Soldiers in your carriage?” she said. “Oh dear, oh dear, I suppose you would call it Bohemian. What a disagreeable situation, is what I should have felt.”
She had looked at Louise when she said this and wrinkled her nose in a kind of mock disgust, but disapproval, distaste, even contempt, was very clear to Louise. Then, she smoked, which Zee, who did not, disliked. However, there was not much she could say about this, since practically all her guests smoked, as did Pete and Michael. She also drank, not only glasses of wine but gin, and this, it was made plain to her, was not the thing for a girl. Louise knew, by now, that the real difficulty was that Zee did not like women generally, which was somehow worse than her disliking her daughter-in-law in particular. What it means is, Louise thought as she brushed her hair, that I can’t win. Whatever I do she won’t like me: she’ll put up with me because of Michael and because she is so keen on babies. There was no doubt about her adoration of Sebastian. She spent hours with him, either nursing him on her lap, or pushing him gently about the terraces outside the house in Michael’s old pram. When Michael was there he had drawn the baby asleep, but she had made an exquisite little wax head of him, and the Judge, Pete, apologizing for being unable to draw, had written him a sonnet. Zee was now engaged upon what she called “one of my stuff pictures” where she used every imaginable kind of material to appliqué and/or embroider to make a picture. This one was a kind of Rousseauish forest with wild animals lurking at every turn. It had great charm and was, Louise could see, just what a young child might enjoy hung in his nursery.
Michael ringing up was another matter that generated faint, but unmistakable tension. As Zee sat on a sofa with the telephone by her most of the day, she usually spoke to him first and at length before she handed him over to Louise, always said, “Tell him not to ring off. When you’ve finished I want to speak to him.” With Zee present, Louise found it difficult to talk to Michael and could hear herself sounding inane and dull. Yes, the baby was well and had put on half a pound since he’d left, yes, Mary seemed to be satisfactory, yes, she was fine, felt far less tired. It was lovely early October weather … how was he? There would follow a long account of his most recent sorties in the Channel or the North Sea, then Zee would make motions and Louise would say goodbye and her bit about him not ringing off and they would settle down to a long chat about Michael’s ship and shipmates, about the state of the war generally—wasn’t it wonderful about the Tirpitz being torpedoed? Somebody called Jimmy—in the Navy, who was the son of one of Zee’s admirers—had spent the summer in a tank in Welwyn Garden City in a miniature sub, could it be he? If so she must send a telegram to his father. And so on. Louise would pretend to read, or sometimes she would simply go out of the room, but whatever she did there was a sense of defeat and being excluded. At least letters were more private and she liked writing them—wrote at least twice a week, and Michael was extremely good and wrote at least once every two weeks, but she discovered one morning that even they were not inviolate. A letter from Michael lay on her plate at the breakfast table, but it had been opened. It was not that the gummed flap had become ungummed; the letter had been slit open at the top by a paper knife. Zee was not up for breakfast that morning; she was alone with the Judge.
“My letter has been opened!”
“My dear?” He looked up from The Times.
“My letter from Michael. It has been slit open.”
“Oh, yes. Zee asked me to say that she opened it in error. She is so used to his writing, you see, that she did not look properly to see whom it was addressed to.”
Louise put the letter back on the table. Her hands were trembling and she felt so angry that she could not speak.
“I am sorry. I see that it has upset you,” the Judge said. His Roman coin face softened to concern. “Zee will be sorry if you are upset, and that will upset her which, as I know you know, is not good for her heart. Forgive her for me.” He smiled gently and resumed his tranquil expression.
When Zee emerged later in the morning, she said nothing about the letter. Louise was furiously sure that she had read it all, and she did not believe for one second that it had been opened in error but, in a curious way, what she found most confusing about that incident was the Judge’s behaviour. He seemed—and was—a man of the utmost honour, somebody whom she felt would be incapable of lying, cheating or betraying anyone. And yet he had clearly
excused his wife to the point where he did not even seem to think an apology from her necessary. She came uneasily to the conclusion that Hatton was Zee’s world, and that she made the rules in it.
Two other things happened during that visit which disturbed her much more, she realized afterwards, than she knew at the time. The Saturday before she was supposed to go, there was what she called a Distinguished Old Codgers’ Luncheon: an admiral, an ambassador (retired), a general—with his wife—and a very doddery old thing who turned out surprisingly to have been an explorer, “but not any more,” he told her during the soup. “Nowadays I’m hard put to find my way to my bedroom at night.”
“And what do you do in the daytime?” She had learned that one was supposed to pursue the conversation and not simply acquiesce in what had been said to her.
“A good question.” He leaned towards her and said in a stage whisper: “Explore the cavities of me own teeth. Those that are left to me. Haven’t quite reached the sans everything, but no doubt I shall. My word, you’re pretty, aren’t you?” Something about the way he looked at her made her feel hot and she didn’t reply.
As they were moving to the drawing room for coffee, Zee said, “Louise has to go and feed her enchanting baby. Louise, why don’t you bring Sebastian to the drawing room and feed him there? I’m sure everyone will be delighted to meet him, and see you both.”
“I don’t think I will.”
At first, she could see, Zee refused to believe that she meant what she said, and she was subjected to a kind of angry raillery while the company was appealed to. Yes, yes, they said—she noticed that both the admiral’s and the explorer’s rheumy old eyes were fixed upon her breasts, and got to her feet so suddenly that she knocked over her coffee cup in its saucer, and somehow, after that, she managed to apologize, to mop up the coffee and get out of the room.
Mary was waiting for her in her bedroom, walking up and down with Sebastian who was crying.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” She seemed to do nothing but apologize, although it was only a quarter past two.
When Mary had settled her with the baby and left the room, the tears that had filled her eyes now fell—on the baby, on her breast, down her left arm that held him. When he had finished on one side, she put both arms round him and laid her mouth to the side of his little round head and he winced and turned his head away. Love is lost between us, she thought as she put him over her shoulder to get up his wind, but she did not know why and there was no one to ask.
When Mary came to fetch him, she lay on her bed overwhelmed with what she had always called homesickness, only now it seemed something more intangible—no longer a place … Michael, she wanted him, to be here, to take her away, to be on her side about not having to feed her child in front of a lot of lecherous old men, to tell his mother that she should not open his letters, nor stand in the open doorway at night for no reason on earth that bore thinking about … but just as her anger seemed to be making her feel better—which seemed odd to her but was true—she remembered Michael’s expression as he had brought the baby in to her after he had been born. He expected her to feel about Sebastian as his mother so obviously had always felt about him. Despair engulfed her: he had no idea how horribly different she was; if he had, he would be the first to condemn her, and if she could not tell him, how could she be so disloyal as to tell anyone else? Perhaps it will change, she thought. When he is older, and I can talk to him, and play games with him, when he becomes a person. But the indolence of extreme fear prevented her pursuing that possibility, and she was back to Michael, and making an attempt to explain to him why she felt so confused. But when would she see him again? And for how long, and how much of that time would be spent alone? And even if she insisted on that—refused to come here to Hatton, for instance, when he had leave—how could she tell him these awful, unnatural things that so confused her and would undoubtedly shock him when, after a couple of days, he would be off again, back to his ship where he might easily be killed? Leaves for serving men were meant to be respites; you were not supposed to rock the home boat, as it were, rather to provide a calm and restful time and happy memories for them to take back to the war. If she was no good at being a mother, she must try even harder at being a wife.
The last thing that happened during that visit occurred the morning before she left Hatton. Michael had not returned, but she had insisted on going back to the house in London at the end of the three weeks. Zee had suddenly suggested that they go for a walk in the woods. It was a beautiful sunlit day, crisp and clear with a thin white frost on the ground. Michael had rung the day before to say that he had been awarded a DSC for one of the summer battles, and Zee was telling her that she must go to Gieves to buy the appropriate ribbon to sew onto his uniforms. “And, of course,” she added, “I shall come to London to go to the Palace with him, and I think we should arrange a party afterwards.” Then, before Louise could say anything, she went on, “Oh, my dear, you will come with us. He is allowed two tickets’ worth of audience. I was saying to him the other day, that I really thought I should Present you, but we decided it would be better to wait until you have had the next baby.”
“What?”
“Let us sit down, Louise, I have walked enough.” There was a convenient fallen tree.
“You are not an awfully good mother, are you? I know when Michael was born I was unable to think of anything but him for months and months. But Mary tells me you are hardly ever in the nursery. It is therefore very important that he should have a brother to play with. Surely you can see that?”
She managed to say, “I haven’t discussed this with Michael,” but her throat was dry and she wasn’t sure if Zee heard her.
“Michael is deeply in favour of a large family. It is the reason why he married you. Surely you knew that?”
“No.”
“I told him you were too young, but he was sure you were the right wife for him, and of course I would want anything that he wanted that would make him happy.” She rose to her feet. “I would expect you to want that too. But if,” she ended, “I felt that you were—in anyway—making him unhappy, I should stab you to death. I should enjoy doing it.” Her playful smile in no way concealed the chilling content of this remark. For some reason Louise remembered an historical novel of Conan Doyle’s—The Huguenots?—where the woods in Canada had been full of murderous Iroquois who streaked through the chequered light and shadow of the trees exulting in death. The wood she was in now felt just as dangerous; her heart had stopped pounding, and she felt shiveringly cold.
They walked back to the house, emerging from the wood to the lawn on the edge of which were colchicum flaring out of the bare earth.
“How would you describe them?” Zee asked.
“They look like people wearing evening dress in the morning,” she answered.
“Very good! I must remember to tell Pete that.”
Already, the scene in the wood seemed unreal—so bizarre that she half thought that perhaps it had not happened at all.
The Family
December, 1943
“Darling! Are those the only trousers you’ve got?”
“Sort of. I’ve got some breeches for work.”
“But you must have had those for years! They’re about six inches too short.”
Christopher looked down his legs to the gap between the end of his trews and the beginning of his socks—full of holes, but he hoped his mother wouldn’t realize that—to his uncomfortable shoes that he’d also had for years, hardly ever worn and now far too tight.
“They are a bit short,” he said, hoping that agreement would end the matter.
“You can’t possibly go to Nora’s wedding in them! And your jacket’s too short in the sleeves.”
“They always are with me,” he said patiently.
“Well, it’s too late to buy you anything. I’ll see if Hugh has something he could lend you. You’re about the same height.” But nobody could be thinner, she thought, as she
went downstairs to find Hugh.
They were in Hugh’s house, which he had kindly made available for any of the Castle family (Polly and Clary had gone to stay with Louise) for the night before the wedding. All the family, that is, excepting Raymond, who had rung to say he couldn’t make it, but would take an early train in the morning. Angela had not arrived yet, but she was coming out to dinner with them—all arranged by kind Hugh. Which was a godsend, because she certainly couldn’t have relied upon Villy to be of the slightest help. She suspected that it was Villy who had persuaded Raymond to take such a hard line about her returning to Frensham instead of remaining in London. The excuse that the house was needed for Louise seemed to her absurd: Michael Hadleigh had quite enough money to rent or even buy a house for Louise and had no need of the Rydal house, but it had been left jointly to her and Villy, and Raymond had said he was simply not prepared to deal with the upkeep of two houses. She had wondered, after an acrimonious telephone conversation with him, whether Raymond had somehow got to hear about Lorenzo, but really she didn’t see how he could have: they had been pretty careful on the whole, she thought, although Lorenzo had once admitted that he could not bear to burn her dear letters. After that, she had been more careful about what she put in them, and she had kept all his notes—he never wrote more than a note—in the secret compartment of her sewing box. Since going back to Frensham, she had spent a good deal of time in the train going back and forth to London, but from now on this was going to be tricky, since Nora and her husband were coming to live in the house with her, and Nora had plans to turn the place into some sort of nursing home. Perhaps then she would be able to get a very small pied-à-terre in London which would be better: Lorenzo was often working so hard, and so busy, that sometimes, recently, she had made the journey to London in vain. She could tell Raymond that it was better for Nora to have the house to herself because, after all, hers could not be an easy marriage, although this would not be in the least true, since Nora was hell bent on turning the house into some sort of institution with other people in the same state as poor Richard to look after. If need be, she could suggest that either Villy or Michael Hadleigh buy her share of Mama’s house which would give her enough, surely, to lease a small flat. She would be forty-six this year and she had spent over twenty years living for others, bringing up the children, cooking, washing, cleaning the series of horrible little houses that they had had to live in until Raymond’s aunt had died and left them the house in Frensham and a fair amount of money. She had not wanted to live in the country, let alone in that Victorian museum, but Raymond had insisted. Coming into some money, being able to have servants like other people did (like Villy had always had), being able to buy decent clothes, have her hair done at a hairdresser, drive a new, instead of a second-hand car—things of that kind, and there were so many of them—had been quite miraculous at first. But as she had grown less chronically tired—God! she realized that she had always been exhausted all those years—and now having Raymond out of the way so that there were none of the tensions of being a buffer between him and the children, something had snapped in her, as though a butterfly had emerged from this chrysalis of domesticity: all she wanted was to have fun, to cease making do with anything that did not please her. The children, with the exception of Judy who they could now afford to send to a boarding school, were launched upon their lives. She knew that Villy thought her frivolous, and would intensely disapprove, well, did, so far as she knew the situation. Villy thought that either she should be making a home for Raymond at Woodstock, or be doing some war job. If Villy knew about Lorenzo she would go through the roof. She had said that once to him, and he had replied that she was a cold woman, who, he suspected, was a very English type where sex was concerned. (One of the things she loved about him was his almost feminine perspicacity.) When the war was over, she supposed she would have to go back to being Raymond’s wife, whatever that then might involve, but meanwhile she would make the most of what she described to herself as an Indian summer.
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