The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  At this point he resorted as usual to telling himself that at least she was out of pain – he could never have wanted, could not have borne any more of that for her. It was better that she should die and leave him than continue to be so racked.

  He finished reading and signing the letters that Miss Pearson had brought in when she gave her notice. She would collect and pack them into their envelopes while he was at lunch. He buzzed her to call a taxi for him and to say that he might be late returning.

  He was lunching with Rachel – at least it was not going to be one of those alcoholic business lunches that he always found particularly trying after his headaches. He found that he was constantly reassuring himself with small mercies of this kind.

  He was meeting her at a small Italian restaurant in Greek Street – chosen because it was quiet and likely to proffer food that Rachel would accept. Like the Duchy, who absolutely never ate out of her own house, Rachel had a profound distrust for ‘bought food’ – it was either too rich, or too elaborate, or else menacing in some other way. But on this occasion it had been she who had suggested lunch – she was going to be in London for the night anyway as she was going to a concert with Sid. ‘I simply must talk to you about Home Place and Chester Terrace and all that,’ she had said. ‘They each keep talking to me about it and saying what they want to do, but they don’t want the same things. It’s hopeless trying to talk at weekends – we’re bound to be interrupted.’

  But when he arrived at the restaurant he was greeted by Edda, the elderly proprietress, who said that the ladies were upstairs, and when he reached the table there was Rachel – with Sid.

  ‘Darling, I do hope you don’t mind. Sid and I had sort of arranged to spend the day and I’d forgotten about our lunch when I made the plan with her.’

  ‘Of course not. Lovely to see you,’ he said heartily. Privately, he thought Sid a bit odd: in her rather bulky tweed suit that she seemed to wear all the year round with a shirt and tie, her unfashionably short hair and her face with the complexion of a nut, she looked like a little old boy, but she was darling Rachel’s best, if not her oldest and only friend and therefore merited his good will. ‘I always think of you as practically one of the family,’ he added, and was rewarded by the faint colour that came and went on his sister’s anxious face. ‘I told you,’ she was saying to Sid. ‘I had to persuade her to come,’ she was now saying to him.

  ‘I know you have family matters to discuss – didn’t want to be in the way, you know. I promise I’ll sit as quiet as a mouse. I won’t say a word.’

  This turned out to be quite untrue. They did not get down to things at first: food had to be chosen. Rachel, having perused the menu, eventually asked whether she could simply have a plain omelette – just a small one? This was after he and Sid had decided upon minestrone and braised liver and he and Sid were drinking martinis that Rachel had refused.

  They smoked while they were waiting for their food: he had bought a packet of Passing Clouds for Rachel, which he knew she liked best after her Egyptian ones that were hardly ever to be found.

  ‘Oh, darling, thank you! But Sid has magicked my old brand from somewhere – I don’t know how she does it.’

  There’s just one place that sometimes has them,’ Sid said offhandedly, as one for whom small triumphs made up for their lack of size by their frequency.

  ‘Well, keep them anyway – as a reserve,’ he said.

  ‘I feel very much spoiled.’ Rachel put them in her bag.

  When the minestrone arrived, he suggested that she start on the parents’ problems. The Brig wanted to move back to Chester Terrace so that he would be nearer the office, ‘although the poor old boy can’t do much when he gets there’, but the Duchy, who had always hated the house, describing it as gaunt and dark and too large for them anyway, wanted to stay in Home Place. ‘She doesn’t really like London at all, poor darling, she wants her rock garden and her roses. And she thinks it would be bad for the grandchildren if they didn’t have the house for holidays. But he gets so restless there, now that he can’t ride or shoot or do any more building … And they keep telling me what they want, but they don’t talk to each other about it. So you do see …’

  ‘Couldn’t they just go back to what they did before the war? Keep both houses and then the Duchy could be in the country as much as she liked.’

  ‘No, I don’t think they could. Eileen really wouldn’t be up to the stairs in London any more, and the Brig has promised the cottage over the garage to Mrs Cripps and Tonbridge when they’re married – it seems unfair to move them. Chester Terrace would need at least three servants, and I’m told that it’s almost impossible to get anyone reliable. The agencies say that girls simply aren’t going into service any more.’ She stopped and then said, ‘Oh dear! I do hope I’m not spoiling your soup – it looks so delicious.’

  ‘Like to try it?’ Sid held out a spoonful.

  ‘Oh, no, thank you, darling. If I have any soup, I wouldn’t have room for anything else.’

  ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘Good question,’ Sid said at once.

  Rachel looked nonplussed. ‘I hadn’t thought. Whatever would make them happiest, I suppose.’

  ‘He wasn’t asking you that. He was asking you what you would like.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to be in London?’

  ‘Well, in some ways it would be rather nice.’

  While the soup plates were being removed and the main course brought and served Rachel explained that it would be easier for her to do a third day in the office if she was in London. She could not really keep up with the work in the two days she was now working. By the time she had listened to everybody’s troubles … and she was off with the latest hard luck story: Wilson, whose wife had to go into hospital – no grandparents to look after the children, and they’d been bombed out, lived in two damp basement rooms, and his sister, who might have taken the children, was being divorced, her husband, shortly to come out of the Navy, wanted to marry a girl he’d met in Malta, anyway, she was so upset that she was in no state to look after anyone …

  Her omelette was congealing on the plate.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, taking a tiny mouthful, ‘I’m boring you both with my silly office troubles …’

  But they weren’t her troubles, he thought, they were other people’s. He wondered, for a moment, what on earth the staff had done before she joined the firm. Officially, her job had been to deal with salaries, insurances and holiday dates for the staff, together with petty-cash accounts and office supplies. In fact, she had become the person to whom everyone went with their problems – either in the office or out – and she now knew far more about everyone who worked for the Cazalets than he or his brothers had ever done.

  Sid said, ‘But none of this has anything to do with what you would like to do.’ There was an edge to her voice, Hugh thought; she sounded almost accusing.

  ‘Well, of course it would be nice in other ways, but one can’t make this sort of decision for purely selfish reasons.’

  ‘Why not?’ There was a short, charged silence and then Sid repeated: ‘Why on earth not? Why are everybody’s feelings more important than yours?’

  It was almost as though she was talking about her feelings, he thought – he was beginning to feel out of his depth somehow, and certainly rather uncomfortable. Poor Rach! She simply wanted everything to be right for everyone; it wasn’t fair to bully her about it. She had gone rather pale, he noticed, and had given up even a pretence of eating her omelette.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seems to me that Chester Terrace should go. It’s far too big, and it would be better to sell the lease while there’s a reasonable amount of it left, and then they won’t be liable for the repairs. So what about keeping Home Place and getting a flat for you and the Brig when he wants to be in London? Then the Duchy could stay in the country. You’d only need one servant and a daily to run a flat, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘A flat. I don
’t know whether either of them would consider a flat. The Brig would think it was poky, and the Duchy would think it was fast. She thinks flats are for bachelors until they get married.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Sid said. ‘Hundreds of people will be taking to flats in the same way that they will have to learn to cook.’

  ‘But not at the Duchy’s age! You can’t expect someone of seventy-eight to start learning to cook!’ There was an uncomfortable silence, and then she said, ‘No. If anyone has to learn to cook, it should be me.’

  Sid, looking contrite, put out her hand to touch Rachel’s arm. ‘Touché! But it’s your life we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

  Hugh felt obscurely irritated at her trying to include him. In spite of what she had said about not saying a word, she was interfering in what he felt was none of her business. He signalled the waiter to get a menu, and said – to Rachel, ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll have a word with the Brig about an alternative to Chester Terrace and you and I can hunt for a suitable place. If the worst comes to the worst, you could always move in with me as an interim. Now, who would like an ice or fruit salad or both?’

  When Rachel, who immediately said that she couldn’t possibly eat any more, had been persuaded to have some fruit salad and he and Sid had settled for a bit of both and he’d ordered coffee for everyone, he raised his glass and said, ‘What shall we drink to? Peace?’

  Rachel said, ‘I think we should drink to poor Mr Churchill as we seem to be letting him down so badly. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary that they should want to chuck him out the moment the war’s over?’

  ‘The war isn’t completely over. There’s another good two years’ fighting in Japan, I should think. I suppose one has to say that at least the other lot are used to government – at Cabinet level anyway.’

  Sid said, ‘I’m rather in favour of the other lot. It’s time we had a change.’

  Hugh said: ‘I think what most people want is to get back to normal as soon as possible.’

  ‘I don’t think we shall be going back to anything,’ Rachel said. ‘I think it’s all going to be different.’

  ‘You mean the Welfare State and a brave new world?’

  He saw her face puckering in a little flurry of frowns and remembered suddenly how he and Edward had called her Monkey when they wanted to tease her.

  ‘No, what I meant is that I think the war has changed people, they’ve got kinder to one another.’ She turned to Sid. ‘You think that, don’t you? I mean people have shared things more – particularly the awful ones, like being bombed and separated and all the rationing and then getting killed—’

  ‘I think there isn’t the same kind of arrogant indifference,’ Sid said, ‘but if we don’t have a Labour government there jolly soon will be.’

  ‘I’m absolutely no good at politics, as you well know, but surely both sides are saying the same things, aren’t they? Better housing, longer education, equal pay for equal work …’

  ‘They always say that sort of thing.’

  ‘We’re not saying the same thing. We aren’t going to nationalize the railways and the coal mines et cetera.’ He glared at Sid. ‘That’s going to cause chaos. And, from our point of view, it means that we shall be faced with only one customer instead of a comforting number.’

  The waiter brought their coffee – just as well, he thought: he really didn’t want to have a political argument with Sid – he was afraid he might be rude to her and that would upset Rachel.

  Now she was saying, ‘What are you going to do? About your house, I mean. Are you going to stay in it? Edward and Villy are selling theirs and looking for somewhere smaller, which seems sensible.’

  So that he can afford a second place to put that woman in, he thought. He said, ‘I don’t know. I’m fond of it. Sybil said she never wanted to leave it.’

  There was a short silence. Then Sid said she would join them in a minute.

  ‘Miss Pearson is leaving me,’ he said, to deflect their thoughts.

  ‘Oh dear. I was afraid she might. Her mother’s become such an invalid. She told me she got back last week and found the old lady on the floor. She’d fallen trying to get out of her chair, and she couldn’t get up.’

  ‘I shall miss her.’

  ‘I’m sure you will. It’s pretty awful for her because she won’t get her full pension. I was going to talk to you about that. I’m afraid she’s going to be rather hard up.’

  ‘She must have saved a bit – she’s been working for us for at least twenty years.’

  ‘Twenty-three, actually. But her mother’s only got a very small widow’s pension that dies with her. Except for the house, Muriel won’t get left anything, and I should think that by the time her mother dies she’ll be too old to get another job. Don’t you think, in the circumstances, that perhaps we ought to see that she gets her full pension?’

  ‘The Old Man would say that it was setting a dangerous precedent. If she gets it, everyone else will think they’re entitled to the same treatment.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ she said – quite sharply for her. ‘He needn’t know, and nor need any of the staff.’

  He looked at her: her expression was uncharacteristically ferocious – an expression so ill-suited to her that it made him want to laugh. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course. You’ve completely melted my stony Tory heart.’

  She smiled then, wrinkling her nose in the way she always did when she wanted to add affection to a smile. ‘Your heart isn’t in the least stony, dear old boy.’

  Then Sid returned; he called for the bill, and Rachel said that she would go and find the ladies.

  As soon as she was gone, Sid said, ‘Thanks for the lunch, it was very good of you to have me.’

  He looked up from writing the cheque: she was fiddling with the coffee sugar and he could not help noticing her strong, elegant, but somehow mannish hands.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘that I know I should have shut up about what are, from your point of view, purely family matters, but she never gives herself a chance! She’s always worrying about other people – never gives herself a thought. And I supposed that now the war is over – here anyway – at last she might consider some life of her own.’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want one.’

  For some reason, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why, this quite harmless remark seemed to go home. For a split second she looked positively stricken; then she said so quietly that he could barely hear her, ‘I do hope you’re not right.’

  Rachel returned. They parted in the street outside, he to go back to the office, and they for a shopping spree in Oxford Street, at HMV for records, and Bumpus for books – ‘It’s so handy that they’re practically next door to each other.’ There was a faint, mutual atmosphere of apology.

  Much later, in the early evening when he’d finished at the office, had caught a twenty-seven bus back to Notting Hill Gate and walked down Lansdowne Road to Ladbroke Grove and let himself into his silent house, he remembered Rachel’s remark about his heart not being stony. It seemed to him that his heart was not so much a matter of texture, it was more a question of whether it still existed at all. The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down. Feeling had become an exercise that no longer enhanced the present; he slogged from one day to the next without expectation that one would be different from another. He was capable of irritation, of course, with small things like his car not starting, or Mrs Downs failing to collect his laundry, and anxiety – or was it simply anger? – at Edward’s behaviour over Diana Mackintosh (he had refused point blank to meet her); since the time when he had failed to get Edward to see that he must give her up, Hugh had refused even to discuss the matter. This resulted in it
being very difficult to discuss anything with Edward in the old, easy way that they had used to do, and left them in a state of mutual disagreement and irritation about things like the Southampton project, which he thought thoroughly ill-advised, a dotty way to use their capital and something which, if there had not been this other profound, private rift, he might have been able to reason Edward out of. At any rate, he missed their old intimacy and affection, compounded by the fact that in the old days it was exactly the kind of thing that he would have been able to resolve by talking it over with Sybil, whose attention and good sense he had come to value even more now that they were no longer available. He tried to have conversations with her about it, but it was no good, he missed her precisely because he could not become her in the duologue. He would say his say – and there would be silence while he battled with his failure to imagine how she would have responded. He had never had the same intimacy with Rupert; his being six years younger had been crucial. When he and Edward had gone to France in 1914, Rupert had been at school. When he and Edward had gone into the firm together, Rupert had gone to the Slade and had been determined to be a painter and have nothing to do with the family business. When he had come in, it had been after a lot of dithering, and had been largely, Hugh now felt, because he wanted more money to please Zoë. Then, since his amazing reappearance – long after (although it was not voiced) everyone had given up hope of it – he had seemed, after the initial family celebration, to be curiously withdrawn. Hugh had had one good evening with him – had taken him out to dinner the evening after the Navy had relinquished him, and before it they had drunk a bottle of champagne together at home. Rupert had asked about Sybil and he had told him about those last days when he and Sybil had talked and talked and discovered that they had both known that she was going to die and had each tried to shield the other and the sweet relief when this was no longer something that either of them felt the need to do. He remembered how Rupert had stared at him without speaking, his eyes filled with tears, and how, for the first time since her death, he had felt comforted, felt some of the rigid blocked grief begin to dissolve from this silent, complete sympathy. They had gone out together afterwards to dine, and he had felt almost light-hearted. But it had never been like that again: he sensed that there was some mystery about Rupert’s long time away and his reticence about it, and after one tentative attempt, he did not pry. He imagined that if one had been so isolated for so long, a return to ordinary family life must be difficult and left it at that.