Then one day Archie rang up and asked her to have dinner with him. She had not seen him for several weeks because his job had taken him out of London. “Do you mean just me, or me and Poll?”
“I think on this occasion just you. I had dinner with Poll last week anyway.”
“Did you? She didn’t tell me.”
When Polly came back from work she asked if she could borrow a shirt.
“OK, but you really should keep your shirts clean.”
“It’s not that. Most of them have reached the stage where even if I wash them, they don’t look washed. So I’m always wearing the other one.”
“All right, you can have my blue and green check.”
“Couldn’t I have your cream-coloured one? I’ll have to wear my linen pinafore—it’s the only decent cool thing I’ve got.”
“Where are you going?” Polly asked while she was considering this.
“Archie’s. He’s asked me to supper.”
“You never said.”
“He only rang up after lunch. Anyway, you had dinner with him last week, and you never told me.
“I’ll wash and iron it after I’ve worn it,” she said, as she followed Polly upstairs to their attics.
“You’re a rotten ironer, I’d only have to do it again. Goodness, it’s hot up here.”
It was baking. The heatwave had struck at the beginning of the week. People had begun by saying what lovely weather, but after a few days of it things like queueing for buses in the sun, working in hot offices, milk going off and even water seeming not cold enough out of the tap had frayed tempers. Conductors answered back, people became scarlet with sunburn from eating their sandwiches in the parks on the burned grass, cab drivers swore at pedestrians, pubs ran out of block ice and drinks became tepid, and above, in a sky leaden and suffused with heat, dozens of the small robot planes pestered and frightened people with their impartial death and destruction. Waiting for the engine to cut out, people sweated sometimes with fear as well as from the heat.
“It’s a good thing we don’t have to try to sleep up here,” she said, trying to get Poll to be friendly about the shirt. But it was no good.
“The trouble is that you’ll sweat in the shirt and then it’ll never be the same again.”
“I suppose I would,” she answered sadly.
“Couldn’t you just wear your pinafore with nothing? It would be cooler.”
“If I try it on, will you tell me?”
“You’ll have to shave under your arms, though,” Polly said when Clary had paraded before her. “Otherwise it looks perfectly all right.”
So she borrowed Polly’s razor and put on her best sandals, and scrubbed her nails—she was getting slightly better about not biting them—and set off for South Kensington which meant changing trains at Baker Street. By the time she had walked to Archie’s flat from South Kensington station, she knew her face was scarlet, which would not, she reflected sadly, as she waited for him to answer the bell, go at all well with her terracotta linen. But—
“Am I pleased to see you!” he exclaimed as he opened the door and she blushed with pleasure: luckily she was so hot she knew it wouldn’t show.
He had put two chairs out on his small balcony that overlooked the square garden and brought her a gin and lime. She didn’t actually like it, but it was the thing to drink.
“Well now,” he said, “tell me your news. Have you got another job?”
“No. I did a bit of typing for a friend of Louise’s. A rather bad play, I thought, but of course I didn’t say.”
“You could do better, could you? Well, why don’t you?”
“Me? Write a play?”
“Well, what else are you writing?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh.”
“I was writing something, but I’ve stopped. What do you think of socialism?” she said, partly to change the subject and partly because it was something that she had planned to ask him about.
“I think we shall have quite a bit of it after the war.”
“Do you?”
“I think it’s on the cards. War is quite a leveller, you know. When practically everybody’s life has been on the line, people are unlikely to take kindly to reverting to a class system where some people’s lives matter more than others.”
“But they don’t, do they? I mean they can’t have. Do you think that after the war, women will be taken more seriously then?”
“I have no idea. Aren’t they taken seriously?”
“Of course not. Look at how women get landed with all the dullest jobs, and I don’t think they even get paid the same as men for doing them. If men were doing them.”
“Are you going to be a feminist, Clary?”
“I might be. The point about socialism is getting things fairer. I am in favour of that.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“I know it isn’t—in some ways. But that needn’t stop us trying to make it fairer in the ways that we could. Yes, I think I will be one.”
“A socialist or a feminist?”
“I could perfectly well be both. Wanting things to be fairer for women is part of wanting things to be fairer for everyone. Isn’t it? Archie, are you agreeing with me, or are you merely laughing at me?”
“I have an uneasy feeling that I’m agreeing with you. Of course, I’d rather laugh. You know me.”
She looked across the balcony at him. He sat, with his long legs stretched stiffly out; his long arms with the shirt sleeves rolled up were folded and he was surveying her with his usual expression of suppressed amusement, but beside that she was conscious of a kind of intelligent looking, as though he was really seeing her without criticism or sentiment.
“I don’t really,” she said. “I feel suddenly amazed at how little I know you.”
“The trouble is,” she said much later when they were having tinned salmon and a salad made by Archie on the balcony, “that I think I have taken you for granted. I think all the family do. I mean, look at how you sorted out the problem with Neville. I can’t see who else could have done it. Uncle Edward would just have said that all schools are awful and he must put up with it. Uncle Hugh would have gone to see them and got them to say they would stop him being bullied. Of course, it would have gone on. Aunt Rach would have taken him out in the holidays for an extra special treat.”
“And what about Zoë? What would she have done?”
“Precisely nothing. She’s taken to going to London more and more, and in between she spends all her time with Jules or altering her clothes. Neville and I simply don’t count her at all.”
“So what are you going to do? I mean besides embracing new ideas?”
“I don’t know. Find some sort of other boring job, I suppose.”
“Why can’t you find a job and write?”
“I don’t know what to write any more.”
“What about the journal?” He knew about that, although she had never shown it to him.
“I’ve sort of stopped it.” She knew he knew that she had been writing it for her father.
After a pause he said, “Well, one of the points of a journal is that it should go on, be complete. You might as well do the whole war.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Ha! Well, in case you don’t know, one of the differences between being an amateur and a professional is that amateurs only work when they feel like it, and professionals work whatever they are feeling.”
“Then I’m not a professional, am I? It’s as simple as that.” She said it as aggressively as she could manage. “I’m going to the lavatory,” she said, to escape. In the lavatory, she cried. “If I talk to him about Dad, he’ll only try and tell me kind lies about what he thinks. He doesn’t believe that Dad will come back. I don’t want to hear what he doesn’t think.” She had to blow her nose on Bronco which from experience she knew to be stiff and unsatisfactory for the purpose.
By the time she had rejoined him, he had moved the
supper things from the balcony and lit a lamp in the sitting room. He made her sit on the sofa and he perched on the arm at the opposite end.
“Listen, Clary,” he said. “I know why you’ve stopped writing the journal, or at least I guess I know. You thought he’d come back the moment the invasion started. I think if I was you I would have thought that, but looking at it from the outside it is very unlikely. The Allies haven’t got even to where Pipette left him, and, anyway, he might have travelled considerably since then. Communications in France will have got temporarily worse, not better. I’m not trying to comfort you,” he said sharply, “so there’s no need to look so cross. I’m telling you what I think—not what I feel. So if all these years you’ve been sure about him, I’m saying you’ve no reason to stop feeling sure just because we’ve set foot in France. We haven’t liberated the wretched country yet, and even when we have there’ll be chaos.”
“You’re trying to keep my hopes up,” she said.
“I’m trying to get you to see that there’s no particular reason why they should have changed.”
“But wouldn’t he just be able to go to wherever the armies are and join them? He must know the Allies have landed—it’s weeks now. That woman who helped them—she must have been in the underground. Surely she would do something?”
He got up to fetch his pipe from the mantelpiece. “Well, except that he’s almost sure to know about the invasion, the answer to the rest is no, or almost certainly no. The invasion has meant that the underground have been working overtime. It won’t have been the time for them to be worrying about individuals. Much better for him to sit tight until things settle down.”
“You do believe! Oh, darling Archie, you think the same as me, don’t you? You do!”
“I don’t—” he began, but when he saw her face he stopped. She could not see him because she was blinded with tears. He moved over to her, gave her shaking shoulders a small pat.
“Clary. It doesn’t matter a damn what I think. You’ve hung on so long, don’t give up now.”
“Feeble of me.”
“Yes, it would be.”
“Not fair on Dad either.”
“There you go again. Fairness doesn’t come into it. We’re talking about faith, not politics. Like a cup of tea?”
“Although, actually, you know,” she said much later, when she was helping him clear up supper, “I think all kinds of things in life may be fairer than people think. Look at Greek tragedy. Wicked deeds get paid for—even faulty characters like King Lear pay for it. It’s the other way round that worries me. I mean, if you cast your bread on the waters, do you get back cake?”
“Well, I suppose you might, without recognizing the cake,” he replied, rejoicing in the speed of her recovery. “Now, I’m going to put you in a taxi.”
“Got your latchkey?” he asked as he put her into the cab.
“Of course I have, Archie. I’m nineteen, I’m not a child.”
“I was merely checking. I know you’re not a child.”
The next day, she resumed her journal.
The Family
April–August, 1944
“Oh dear! I do wish he wouldn’t answer the telephone.”
Rachel looked at her mother with dismay. She was really upset, grinding her tiny lacy handkerchief together with her soft mauve fingers (her circulation was never very good).
“What’s he done now?”
“He’s asked Brigadier and Mrs. Anderson to dinner again.”
“They came only about ten days ago!”
“That hasn’t stopped them accepting. Mrs. Anderson has lost her cook, so naturally she is mad keen on going out.”
“And so is he, I should think, since she is such a crashing bore. Never mind, darling. We can have rabbit again, and there are lots of vegetables in the garden.”
“Do you think we could move the telephone? Would he notice? Because if we took it out of his study, this sort of thing would not keep on happening. Mrs. Cripps has quite enough to do as it is.”
“He’d really mind that. He thinks the telephone is his. We could get another instrument, and put it somewhere else, I suppose.”
“Oh, I don’t think we need go as far as that.” The Duchy had always regarded telephones as a decadent luxury, and had originally campaigned that it should be installed in the back passage that led to the cellar, thereby ensuring that anyone using it would have to stand in what was probably the most powerful draught in the house. The Brig had prevailed, however, and now that he was blind lay in wait for its ringing all day.
“Well, I shall simply have to brave Mrs. Cripps. It is not simply a matter of two extra, it means trying to contrive at least one extra course.”
“Shall I post your letters for you?”
“They are not mine. They are Dolly’s. She has taken to writing to all her girlhood friends, some of whom married but I don’t remember who, and most of whom are dead. Look! Mabel Green, Constance Renishawe, Maud Pemberton—and sometimes she hasn’t even put an address!”
“It keeps her happy and occupied, darling.”
“But nobody ever answers! And she asks me—several times a day—if there are any letters for her. It’s so pathetic, it makes me feel I should write. I do hope, darling, that I shall not succumb to senility, and cause you this kind of anxiety.”
Rachel reassured her, because, of course, she thought, as she walked down the drive and then down the hill to the pillar box, there was nothing else she could do. But the fact was that the old people in the house were beginning to outnumber the young and able. Everybody was stretched: Ellen’s rheumatism had become steadily worse until now she had difficulty going up and down stairs and was generally hardly agile enough for the children in her care. Mrs. Cripps was having trouble with her legs: even the heavy support stockings she now wore only kept her varicose veins at bay, and the Duchy lived in constant fear that she would announce one housekeeping morning that things were too much for her. McAlpine was not only riddled with arthritis, but had lost practically all his teeth and, since he refused to wear the dentures provided for him, or to make any concession at all about the kind of food that he ate, suffered constant bouts of severe indigestion that shortened his temper even more. The Brig, as well as being blind, had an increasingly weak chest which was not improved by the cigars he refused to give up; in winter he was regularly bedridden from bronchitis and had twice had pneumonia when that new miracle drug M & B had saved his life. The Duchy seemed miraculously to be preserved: in spite of her age, seventy-four this year, her hair remained its dark grey, her back as straight as it had always been, but Rachel had noticed that she became more easily upset by small difficulties and the setbacks of domestic wartime life. Miss Milliment—whose age nobody knew, but Rachel and Villy suspected that she was in her eighties—had, it seemed quite suddenly, become rather deaf, a state that she made great efforts to conceal. She certainly pulled her weight, teaching the younger children in the mornings and reading to the Brig in the afternoons, but she would retire to bed immediately after supper and on Sundays she often spent the morning there. She still trotted lightly about in a meandering fashion, but Rachel had noticed that she sometimes made little faces when she ran into furniture, as though something—her feet, possibly?—hurt. The household still contained three children: Wills, Roly and Juliet, aged six, five and four respectively—but they could not be expected to help with the chores, although they were all given tasks to do by Ellen; then there was Lydia, who had reached the age of thirteen and was rather on her own during the term time, although she still played with Neville when he came home. She could not be relied upon to do the same chore two days running. In between, were Villy, who had become utterly indispensable, and Tonbridge, who had taken over a number of small jobs not usually within the province of a chauffeur (he was perfectly happy to whitewash the larder for Mrs. Cripps, but simply loathed doing anything about the horses, of whom he was plainly terrified, but with poor old Wren gone they had eith
er to be fed and watered or put down, and the Brig would not hear of the latter). Zoë was not a great deal of use; Rachel had felt sorry for her immured in the country with the terrible uncertainty about Rupert. For a time she had worked at the convalescent home down the road, but for some reason she had stopped, and nowadays she went frequently to London to see some married friend who had moved there, leaving Juliet to Ellen. Rachel could not help feeling that this was a little selfish, although she made all the excuses for Zoë that she could—she was not yet thirty, had had very little fun and had a perfect right to have friends of her own outside the family. Still, Juliet was a handful for Ellen on her own, and when Zoë returned from her trips she slept even later in the mornings and often said she was too tired to take the children for their afternoon walk.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 133
