The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Dinner, in the dining room that had such enormous windows and such a high ceiling that there was no way it could ever be warm. They sat at a table with one carnation and maidenhair fern and had tinned tomato soup, cold ham and potatoes and pickled beetroot followed by a choice of apple pie or a prune mould. Michael said the breakfasts were the best meal there. The dining room was about half full with naval people and others who, Michael said, were catching the midnight ferry. After dinner, they went and sat in another enormous room where, after lengthy periods of waiting, people could have coffee or afternoon tea or gins and tonics brought to them. They had coffee and Michael talked about his new ship, and she thought about Hugo ringing Hamilton Terrace and finding she was not there. She had managed to leave a note for Polly and Clary in which she said that Michael had suddenly insisted upon her leaving with him on Sunday, that Hugo had also had to leave but that he would be ringing, and would whichever one of them answered the telephone explain to him where she was? This was better than nothing: she knew that Hugo would know that she had not wanted to go away, and if he knew where she was, perhaps he would write her just one letter, even if she could not reply to it.

  She got through the evening by pretending she was acting in a rather dull play, and she noted, with a kind of objective interest, that Michael responded to her performance as though it wasn’t one at all. He expected her to be as interested in everything to do with his ship as he was himself; therefore, she thought, he would have been more surprised if she had been bored. By the time they retired for the night, he had become far less schoolmasterish, and altogether warmer and more expansive. There was the usual performance in bed but, after initial repugnance, she decided to continue her performance and discovered that this meant that she did not need to feel anything at all. But afterwards when she could feel alone because he was asleep, the tide of homesickness, of longing for Hugo engulfed her: recalling his voice—from the first day, “I say, you really are distractingly beautiful …” “What I should really like would be a lobster …”, the day he brought the table and they spent all the afternoon polishing it together with proper beeswax, the day he found the glass dome—“Miss Havisham’s wedding bouquet,” he had cried, “we simply must have that!” His kindness to her when she had stuck her throat-painting brush too far down and had been sick and was so miserable (nobody in her life had been as kind as that): her mother had always seen that she was nursed, but the implication had usually been that if only Louise had been less careless, she might not have caught whatever it was in the first place; her father had always visited her when she was ill in bed—and as far back as she could remember she had felt both ungrateful and uneasy at the attention … but Hugo had been there when she woke in the night, after reading to her for hours, that extraordinary book about an ordinary man becoming Pope, a very interesting exposition of the writer’s personal fantasy, Hugo had said, when he told her about the strange author who called himself Baron Corvo. He had found Hadrian the Seventh on a second-hand book-stall; he was always finding books—never ones that she had ever heard of—bringing them home and reading bits to her. Then his telling her that he loved her, “the person that I love most that I’ve ever met”: he’d said it twice, the second time in their last few seconds together. Then “It’s a hell of a mess, isn’t it?” He had never been in love before, he had told her once, when he was helping her to wash her hair. “I’ve liked girls, and sometimes I’ve thought they were far from plain, but my feelings about them were quite minor.”

  “You smell of apples,” she had said to him one evening when they were lying together, and she remembered how, after he had gone, and she had flung herself onto the bed he slept in, the pillow had that same—faint—scent. Every night she lived with him during those hours and when she finally slept she would hold her own hand and pretend that it was his.

  The dreary and aimless regime of living in an hotel with nothing to do was quickly established. In the ensuing weeks, she went for lonely—and usually wet—walks, she lunched alone with a book, sometimes—because in spite of doing nothing she felt perpetually tired—she would go up to the room and lie on the bed and cry and then fall asleep. Before dinner, there would often be drinks, parties aboard one ship or another: she struggled down slimy iron ladders set into the dock walls onto the faintly rocking decks of gunboats, Michael’s old refitted destroyer, or either of the frigates that were also there. Down other ladders to saloons of various sizes, but always smelling of diesel fuel, cigarettes and damp jackets. Then back to the hotel for dinner; she knew the menus by heart quite soon. In the evenings, Michael would draw—fellow officers, sometimes their wives if they were staying for a day or two, and failing that herself. And night after night he established his possession of her, without it seemed any particular pleasure, more as a necessary ritual.

  The whole of January went by: Hugo did not write. At weekends, when he did not go to sea, Michael went shooting at a nearby estate. The owner, with whom he had been at school, was away at the war, but he had told his agent to look after Michael if he wanted any sport. She met the agent, Arthur Hammond, one evening when he brought Michael back after a day’s shooting. He was a gentle, dark, melancholy man with an old-fashioned drooping moustache. Louise liked him; his wife was having a baby, he said, which surprised her because he looked as though he was at least fifty. She thought then that this was a childish notion, but she often had ideas of the kind. The last few weeks of living in the hotel with Michael seemed somehow to have turned her into a child living with a grown-up (Michael, too, seemed to have changed, or perhaps she was seeing him for the first time), a great deal of whose behaviour and conversation was incomprehensible and therefore dull: he seemed to be in charge of her life and she was too unhappy to question or resist.

  So when he returned one evening after a day’s rough shooting and said that Arthur had been summoned to London by his employer, who was too briefly on leave to get to Anglesey, that he was worried about leaving his wife alone for the night and had wondered whether Louise would be so awfully kind as to stay with her, her response had been to ask Michael whether he thought she should go.

  “Yes, I think you should. The poor chap is beside himself with worry. She’s had the baby, but she doesn’t seem to be at all well.”

  “All right. Of course I will.” She started to say that she wasn’t much good at babies, but stopped.

  “Oh, good! Well, you pop up, darling, and get whatever you’ll need for the night and I’ll tell him. He’s telephoning a neighbour of her mother’s. If he can get hold of her, he’s sure she’ll come tomorrow. But be quick, because he’s got to drive you there and then come back to catch his train.”

  Ten minutes later, she was sitting in the car beside Arthur, driving through dark, narrow, winding roads.

  “Baby was premature and she’s had some kind of fever, you see. Very depressed. Don’t know what it is. But the doctor will come tomorrow. And her mother’s coming, so it’s only for the one night. Awfully good of you, I must say.”

  “I don’t know very much about babies,” she said.

  “I don’t know anything about them,” he said. “Married rather late in life. This is her first.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Myfanwy.”

  He stopped the car beside large iron gates at the entrance to a drive. Without the car lights, everything was pitch dark, and he took her arm to guide her through a side gate and into the small lodge. The front door opened straight into a sitting room with an open fireplace; the logs in it had almost burned out, but there was a light from a small lamp on a stool. As they entered there was a slight whirring sound from a very large grandfather clock, whose height was almost that of the ceiling, before it broke into its stately quarter-hour chime.

  “She’s upstairs,” he said.

  She followed him up the steep and narrow staircase that opened onto a square landing on which there was barely room for both of them to stand. A door on the left was ajar, and
he knocked upon it gently before they went into a bedroom almost entirely furnished by an old brass-headed double bed, the room lit by another lamp placed on the floor beside it.

  “Myfanwy, I’ve brought Louise. She is going to stay with you.”

  The girl, who had been lying with her back to the door, turned to face them with a sudden, restless movement.

  “You said to get my mam!” she said. Her face was flushed and her eyes glittered with tears. She tried to sit up, then threw herself back on the pillow. “I want her to come, I told you that!”

  He went up to the bed and stroked her tangled dark hair.

  “She will come. She will be here tomorrow morning. Louise is going to look after you tonight. You remember. I told you I had to go to London for the night.”

  “To see his nibs,” she said. She pushed the bedclothes from her and one strap of her nightdress fell down her white arm exposing one breast, round and taut with milk, and also a tiny baby tightly wrapped in a shawl that lay as silent and motionless as a doll beside her.

  It won’t be able to breathe under the bedclothes, Louise thought, and the awful notion that it was already dead occurred to her.

  The girl seemed to notice Louise for the first time. “He won’t take anything. He doesn’t want me,” she said and the tears began to slide slowly down her face.

  “There’s some medicine the doctor left this morning. She is to have it every four hours.” He indicated a bottle standing by the bed. “Will you see that she takes it? She has a fever, she may not remember. I have to go now,” he said more loudly, but she seemed not to hear him. He leaned down and kissed her, but with another lunging movement she threw herself away from him.

  “Might be better to get the baby away from her for a bit,” he said quietly. “But you know best, of course.”

  Then he was gone. She heard him shut the door and moments later, the car start up and leave. She experienced a moment of absolute panic, in which the baby already being dead and its mother insane with fever and grief assailed her. She looked at Myfanwy who was picking at her nightdress making small moaning sounds when her careless fingers knocked against her breasts. One thing about the poor girl that had been slowly dawning upon her was that she was not much older than herself. Please, God, let me do the right things, came to her. She edged round the bed and picked up the baby. It was far smaller than Sebastian had ever been, but it was not dead. Its swollen, almost transparent eyelids flickered and then were still again.

  “Owen,” Myfanwy said. “He’s going to die. I know that,” and she began to rock and cry in the bed.

  “No,” she said. “I’m going to give you your medicine and you will have a good sleep.”

  “If I go to sleep he will die,” she said in tones of such heartrending certainty that Louise, whose pity had been paralysing her, felt a sudden strength.

  “I will look after him for you while you sleep and then he won’t die,” she said with all the assurance she could bring to such a wild promise.

  But Myfanwy seemed to accept this; she nodded, her eyes fixed trustfully on Louise’s face.

  “Is there a spoon for your medicine?”

  “I have to take it in water. The bathroom’s next door.”

  She retrieved the sticky, much-fingered glass beside the bottle and took it into the bathroom, rinsed it out and measured the dose. “Two teaspoonfuls,” it said, “every four hours.” When she returned, Myfanwy was trying to make the baby take her milk, but he turned his head away from the nipple and began making weary, thin, mewling little cries. Louise took him gently away and put him at the end of the bed. He was still crying, but she felt she must get the medicine into the mother before anything. She helped her to sit up, smoothed the long strands of hair off her face and burning forehead and gave her the glass. When the medicine was drunk, she turned the hot pillows and arranged the sheet over the blankets.

  “Owen’s room is next door to the bathroom,” Myfanwy said. “His things are all there; my mam and I made all his clothes, and there’s a kettle there if you want to make yourself a cup of tea. You won’t sleep though, will you? You’ll watch him for me?”

  “Yes, I will. I’ll stay awake if you promise to go to sleep.”

  When she nearly smiled, Louise saw that she was beautiful.

  “I’ll put some water by your bed, in case you’re thirsty,” she said. But when she came back with it, Myfanwy was asleep.

  The night alone with him began. She boiled a kettle and put some water in a bottle with a teaspoonful of glucose. Then she put the rest of the water into an enamel bowl, and put the bottle in it covered with a nappy to keep it warm. The room was tiny, containing a camp bed, the baby’s basket and a table on which his talcum powder and safety pins were arranged. She felt to see if he was wet, and he was, so she laid him on the camp bed and knelt by it to change him. He was so pitifully small that she was frightened of hurting him, and he started his weary cries while she was doing this. She shut the door and prayed that Myfanwy would not hear him. She had been going to put him in his basket, but his face was so pale and his hands and feet so cold that she changed her mind. She took off her jersey and got into bed, propping herself up with the pillow and her overcoat. Then she unwrapped him from his shawl and laid him in her arms so that their flesh touched. But the room was so cold that she felt this would not be enough to warm him, so it was out of bed again and back to the bathroom where she remembered seeing a hot water bottle. When she had filled it, she wrapped it in the baby’s shawl, and then, because she was terrified of burning him, in her jersey. In bed, she held him so that he was sandwiched between her and the hot water bottle. Once she was still, the silence was broken only by the distant chiming every quarter of an hour of the grandfather clock below. She kept the light on so that she could watch him: the room was very cold, and she could see her own breath. So she sat, staring down into his tiny wizened face, trying to pour life into him, willing him to survive, and after a while, as he became warmer and his skin was suffused with a faint flush, he opened his eyes. For a second they wandered, unfocused and then they came to rest and they were looking at each other. She spoke to him then: endearments, encouragement, admiration for his fortitude and he watched her with a kind of grave attention. She felt his body move, his foot lurched uncertainly against her rib-cage, the fingers of his free hand unfurled and then closed again as tight as a bud. When he began experimenting with his mouth, smacking and mumbling his lips, she tried feeding him with the sugared water. He would not suck or even hold the teat, but if she squeezed it onto his mouth he seemed to accept the drops although the taste of them induced a flurry of little squallish frowns. He took very little—not even an ounce, but it was something. After it, when he opened his hand again, she gave him her finger and was rewarded by his instant grip which loosened only when he fell asleep.

  That was the pattern of the night: she came to listen for the chimes below of the hours—two, three, four. Once, she got up to make sure that Myfanwy still slept, but she carried him with her, and once she boiled another kettle and refilled the hot water bottle and warmed up his drink. Twice more he consented to take a few drops: awake he looked at her all the time, but mostly he slept.

  As the night wore on, it became harder and harder not to fall asleep, but she was determined, and the knowledge that he became cold so quickly helped, and anyway she did not dare to lie down although her back ached from sitting up in the same position. But chiefly it was her growing conviction that his life was a painfully fragile business, that he needed not only her warmth and nursing, but her constant determination that he should live: by then she loved him.

  Soon after seven she heard Myfanwy get up and go to the bathroom and then she was standing in the doorway asking after him. “Oh, he looks fine!” she said. “I’ve had such a sleep thanks to you. I’m dying for a cup of tea. I’m going downstairs to make one.”

  “You go back to bed and take your medicine. Then I’ll bring you the baby and I’ll make
the tea.”

  “I will.”

  He slept while she wrapped him in his shawl: she half wanted him to wake so that they might gaze at one another again, but he did not. She carried him and settled him with his mother. “She is the mother,” she said to herself as she went downstairs to make the tea. It was still dark and she could hear the rain against the small pointed Gothic windows.

  At eight o’clock the district nurse arrived on her bicycle. Louise went down at the knock on the door and found her divesting herself of her mackintosh cape and its hood.

  “Raining cats and dogs, it is,” she said. She spoke as though English was not her first language. “Dr. Jones told me to come as early as I could. Puerperal fever, he said it was. Upstairs, is she? Don’t worry, I’ll find my way.”

  And that was it, really. She accepted the thanks, the offer of a bicycle to get back. When she bent over the baby to kiss him, the nurse advised her not to wake him, so she didn’t. “I’m so grateful to you,” Myfanwy said, but had become shy in the company of the nurse.

  “It was nothing,” Louise assured her.

  But battling home on the bicycle through the rain with her muffler, which was quickly soaked, over her head, although she felt lightheaded with exhaustion, she was somehow exhilarated as well. The image of his gaze with its trust and dignity stayed with her all the five weary miles. I’ll see him again, she thought. I’ll have to take the bicycle back anyway. It occurred to her then that she had never felt like this about Sebastian, but the idea was painful and she was too tired to consider it.