“You wouldn’t be going there, though, would you?”
“I’d quite like to, but I doubt it. Don’t tell Clary that. I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.” (At the time, she had minded that; later it got transmuted to, “I know I can trust you with a secret; in fact, you’re the only person I can trust.”)
He had then said, “Would you miss me, Poll?
(When she was alone, this got changed to: “I can’t bear the idea of going: I should miss you so much.” She went to sleep in his arms.)
What he had said about the war disturbed her. It was true that people were talking about when it would be over, but she had not thought of this simply in terms of Europe and the idea that it would still go on, but thousands of miles away, was deeply depressing. The war seemed now to have been going on for most of her life: it was quite difficult to remember things before it clearly—there was just a jumble of wonderful summers at Home Place, and her cat being alive and Wills not even born. Clary felt much the same.
“Although sometimes I wonder whether our lives would have been very different if there hadn’t been a war. What we’re doing, I mean, not our feelings. I suppose you might have been made to be a deb and that would have been different for you, but I’d probably have the sort of job I’ve got now while I’m practising writing.” She had recently been taken on as a secretary for a literary agent, who ran a very small firm with his wife, and was enjoying it. “They really treat me as an adult,” she had said after the first week. “He’s a pacifist and she is a vegetarian, but except for the ghastly nut cutlets she gives us for lunch sometimes it’s terrifically interesting. It’s a pity you can’t find something that you really enjoy.”
“I can’t think of what it would be,” she replied truthfully. “I mean, if one is simply typing letters and answering the telephone and making appointments for people, it would be pretty much the same whoever they were.” She now worked for a doctor in Harley Street, sitting in a dark room with high ceilings and fake Dutch pictures and a reproduction dining-room table covered with very old magazines.
“And you’re quite sure you don’t want to be a painter?”
“Absolutely. I’d only paint awful nice careful pictures that people who don’t like painting would want.”
“Oh, Poll, do watch out. You’ll fall into the trap of marriage if you don’t. Look at Louise.”
They both fell silent. They had discussed Louise soon after her return and come to no very cheerful conclusions. Clary said Louise was depressed; Polly said she thought she was actually unhappy; they had agreed that Michael was not very easy to talk with, “He simply tells you things he’s doing all the time and Louise must know all that by now.”
“I think marriage is very bad for most women,” Clary said.
“Who told you that?”
“Noël.” Noël was her employer.
“He’s married,” Polly pointed out.
“Only to stop his wife being called up. It was a thoroughly adult arrangement. In the ordinary way, he doesn’t approve of it at all.”
“Do you think,” Polly said tentatively, “that perhaps she fell a bit in love with Hugo? And she was so sad when he had to go away so suddenly that she couldn’t bear to be here any more?”
“I think it’s the other way round. I think Hugo fell in love with her, and as the whole situation was hopeless, she decided to go and join Michael, and then he didn’t want to be here.”
“What makes you think it’s that way round?”
“Because of how Hugo was on the telephone that first evening when we got back from Home Place. When I said she’d gone away, he sounded sort of stunned.”
“She left a message for him.”
“Of course,” Clary said. “I suppose the whole thing could be really awful and they were both in love with each other. That must happen quite a bit, because a good many novelists write about it. I do wish I could ask her.”
“For goodness’ sake, don’t do that!”
“Don’t be stupid. But it all goes to show that marriage is an extremely tricky business and you, particularly, ought to be careful, Poll.”
“I suppose it’s all right if you find the right person.”
“If you do. And then you might find them, and they don’t want you. And, then, men go for much younger women.”
“We are much younger women—”
“We are now—”
“Perhaps the thing would be,” Polly said as casually as possible, “to marry a much older man while one is young.”
“Louise did that,” Clary said.
This silenced her.
She found herself more easily silenced by Clary these days: it had something to do with the fact that she wasn’t confiding in her—couldn’t, she felt, although she was not absolutely sure why not. Although she did not know exactly how Clary would disapprove—with ridicule, resentment, incredulity, even—she did not feel that she could bear whatever it would be: it was almost as though telling Clary would dissolve the whole thing, and, almost as bad, make it impossible to face him in real life. And if she would not tell Clary, she could not tell anyone else. But this withholding produced a kind of conciliatory attitude in her towards Clary that somehow, she felt, weakened things between them.
Then, one Friday morning in the middle of April, when Louise was still in bed and she and Clary were sleepily making toast in the kitchen for breakfast, the telephone rang.
“You answer it. I’ll watch the toast.”
“Bet it’ll be for Louise.” Clary pounded upstairs to the hall.
“Friday the thirteenth,” she announced when she returned. “Wouldn’t you know?”
“What about it?”
“Zoë wants me to go down to look after Jules. She’s got to go to London to look after her friend’s children because the friend is ill or something.”
“Can’t Ellen cope?”
“Apparently Wills has had earache all the week and she’s had no sleep and she’s exhausted. And Noël was going to take me to a play-reading of a frightfully interesting verse-play by a Communist on Saturday evening. He’ll be awfully cross; he simply can’t bear having his arrangements altered.”
“Couldn’t Zoë bring Jules to London and then Nanny would help look after her?”
“They’re going to Hatton with Louise. It’s her monthly weekend there. Oh, it’s all so boring. It isn’t as though I get asked to a Communist play-reading every day.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Jolly nice of you, but no. You went last weekend, after all.”
It was true that she did go every other weekend to be with her father and Wills.
“OK,” she said, “but I did offer. What about Anna?” They had been going to have supper in Anna’s new flat. Clary said she would have to go on her own—a prospect that she found faintly unnerving.
Anna Heisig was the lady who had briefly been a fellow student at Pitman’s. They had eventually approached her and found her friendly and seemingly pleased to know them in an amused kind of way. Apart from the fact that she was foreign (in itself exciting: they did not know any foreigners), she remained mysterious: she came originally from Vienna, but had lived some time in the Far East—Malaysia, where she had been married, again, it seemed, briefly. They had the impression that a great many things had happened to her, but none of them for very long. They were fascinated by her appearance; her look of dishevelled nobility, her voice, which varied in tone from a caressing, almost sly confidence when she was telling them some extraordinary story, to a kind of deep, almost jeering baritone when she was denying them any amazement at her tales: “Oh, yers!” she would exclaim with a good-natured impatience at their disbelief. (“Surely, Anna, all those women wouldn’t travel all the way from Holland to Kuala Lumpur to marry just any man who chose them!” But, oh, yers!) She seemed to enjoy shocking them.
“You must have been very beautiful when you were young,” Clary had once said to her.
&nbs
p; “I was fabulous,” she replied. “I could have had anyone I liked. I was very, very spoiled,” and she smiled with reminiscent sensuality.
“It’s as though all the really exciting things are secret,” Clary had complained when they were walking home together after one of Anna’s evenings.
She had been learning to type in order to write a book. She needed to earn some money, she said, as she had virtually none. In spite of this, she seemed to get lent, or be offered for next to nothing, a series of flats, and she was always strikingly well dressed in a style that was her own. Sometimes she came to Hamilton Terrace, sometimes they went to her where they had interesting food that was new to them: yoghurt, pickled cucumbers, strange pieces of sausage and nearly black bread. Once, Polly had arranged for them to take Anna to dinner with her father at his club, but the evening had not been a success. Her father had been scrupulously polite, and asked her rather stilted questions, to which Anna had responded in a manner both superior and enigmatic, so that conversation was a series of small cul-de-sacs. Afterwards, he said that she was unusual, and she said he was typical, verdicts that put the lid on any further intercourse.
“Anyway,” Clary had said, “you simply couldn’t imagine them married. Socialists and Conservatives don’t marry each other—think of the rows they’d have every time they opened a newspaper. And they are both far too old to change—about anything, poor things. When Noël married Fenella, she simply had to change to Conservative or he wouldn’t have done it.”
That Saturday evening, as she was to have Anna to herself, Polly resolved to see if she could find out some things that she couldn’t find out if Clary was also there.
She took a bunch of daffodils and some chocolates: Anna loved to be given flowers and sweets and had once regaled them with a tale of her home being so overwhelmed with bouquets brought by suitors after a dance that she and her mother had had to hire a cab to take them to the local hospital. “Oh, yers!” she had said. “There were dozens and dozens of them: lilies, roses, carnations, gardenias, violets—all the flowers you can imagine.”
“Clary couldn’t come,” she said, as she followed Anna up the stairs of the little mews house.
“So!”
“She said she’d ring to tell you.”
“I was out much of the day.”
A large piece of sacking was laid upon the floor, and beside it a heap of balls of wool and scraps of material.
“I make one of my famous pictures,” Anna said.
“Can I help you? I’m quite good at sewing.”
“You may knit me a piece four, five inches long of this, if you like. To be the ploughed field.”
She was handed some thick speckly wool and a pair of very large needles.
She had a box gramophone, that you had to wind up, and played records while she got supper. “Mahler is not understood here as he should be,” she said. “You perhaps do not even know this piece.”
Later in the evening, she got around to what she wanted to ask. Should one, if it was a very serious matter, tell somebody something if ordinarily one had always confided in them, but in this instance had not because one was afraid of what they would say?
Anna was immediately engaged. “Is it something about them that you wish to tell them?”
“No—not actually. It’s about somebody else.”
“Does the somebody else know?”
“No, no, they don’t. I’m pretty sure,” she added.
“Then why do you not tell them?”
“I couldn’t do that.” She felt herself grow hot at the thought.
There was a short silence. Then Anna, lighting a cigarette, said calmly, “When I have been in love with people, always I have told them. It was always a staggering success.”
“Really?”
“Really. Oh, yers! They had many times been afraid to tell me—it was a load of bricks off their mind. You mustn’t be so English about love, Polly.”
There was more in this vein, punctuated by a number of stories to prove her point. But Anna did not pry, or try to trap her into any admissions, for which she was grateful, and this gratitude somehow gave added weight to Anna’s opinion. She walked home from Swiss Cottage that evening full of nervous resolution.
At first it seemed as though everything was in her favour. She rang him in the morning; he was there, he was free; he suggested that they take a picnic and go on the river—“Only bring warm clothes, Poll, it will probably be cold.”
They discussed what each could contribute to the picnic and agreed to meet at Paddington station. She dressed with care: her dark green linen Daks trousers bought in a sale at Simpson’s, her gentian blue jersey with a white shirt under it in case it got hot and her duffel coat. It was a fine, sunny morning with small white clouds—a perfect day, she thought for such an outing.
He was waiting for her at the ticket office. He wore his old navy blue roll-neck jersey with grey flannel trousers and an extremely old tweed jacket and he carried a huge straw basket bulging with stuff.
“I’ve brought some things so we can both draw if we feel like it,” he said.
In the train going to Maidenhead they exchanged news about the family, and he did his usual tease about her ignorance of what was going on in the war. Did she even know that Roosevelt had died, for instance?
“Of course I did.” It had been on all the placards of the evening papers two nights ago, but she had to admit that she and Clary had not mentioned it.
“So, who is the next President?”
“Mr. Truman. But I don’t know anything else about him.”
“I don’t think you’re alone there. Jolly bad luck on Roosevelt, though, going through all the Second Front and everything, and then missing all the fun of victory by such a narrow squeak.”
“Is it going to be victory so soon?”
“Pretty soon now, Poll. But it will take a long time to get back to normal.”
“I don’t think I really know what that will be like at all.”
“That’s probably better than having a lot of fixed notions about it.”
“Anyway, one’s own life never seems exactly normal, does it?” she said.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Normal lives are something other people have. Although I expect if you asked them they would say they didn’t.”
“Do you mean like one of those terrible bores who something extraordinary has always happened to?”
“They’re boring, because they’re so boring about it. Some people” (Hugo had come to her mind) “can tell you about losing the soap in their bath and you can’t bear them to stop. Uncle Rupert was like that.”
“Anyway,” he said, after the short sad silence that her last remark had engendered. “Do you equate normality with enjoyment?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because if you do, it might just be that you haven’t had enough enjoyment because of the war. In which case, dear girl, you’ll be in for a series of delightful surprises.”
She glowed at the notion of delightful, and smiled inside at the idea of it being a surprise.
When they had walked from the station to the river and chosen a punt (“but we certainly want paddles as well, I’m not up to much punting”) they set off up river. Archie said that he would do a bit of poling until his leg got tired.
“I suggest we just go and find a really pretty place to tie up and then we can have our picnic and draw.” She agreed with all of that.
They found the perfect place, a little grassy promontory with willows in their fresh green dripping down to the olive-coloured water.
It was not until they had nearly finished lunch that she brought the conversation round to what he would do after the war. He had been talking about Neville, now in his third term at Stowe, and saying how interesting it was that in less than a year somebody could change so much as there now seemed to be so many things he liked doing.
“He does go through interests rather quickly,” she said. �
��I know Clary is worried about that. She’s afraid he will have tried everything by the time he is twenty, and there won’t be anything left. The first term he came back it was playing the trumpet. He wanted to do it most of the time, and the Duchy had to make him do it in the squash court. Now it’s the piano, but he’ll only play by ear, he won’t learn to read music. And he’s mad about buildings. And says he wants to be an actor when he’s not exploring. And he brought a friend back last holidays who only thinks about Bach, just when he’d begun on moths, so they did Bach all day and moths in the evening. Lydia’s very hurt. Since his voice broke he hardly takes any notice of her.”
“They’ll get back together when he is a bit older. And it’s a good thing he is exploring so much. I think that means that by the time he is twenty, he will know what he wants to do.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “He loves you very much. He told Clary. In case you didn’t know.”
He was refilling their glasses with cider. Now, as he handed her her glass, he said easily, “Well, I’ve become a sort of stand-in for his father.”
When he had lit his cigarette, he leaned back on the battered plush cushions. They were opposite one another with the remains of the picnic between them.
“And what are you going to do with your life?”
“I’m not sure. I get rather confused about that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t worry, my pretty Poll. Sir Right will come along and sweep you off on a white horse.”
“Will he? How do you know?”
“I don’t absolutely know. And you may not want simply to get married. You may want to do something on your own. Until Mr. Right turns up.”
Her heart was thudding; she sat up; it felt like now—or never.
“Well, I would quite like to get married.”
“Aha! And have you chosen the lucky chap?”
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 140
