The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She had to agree. His parents sounded like monsters: she could not imagine the awfulness of being abandoned by a live mother – hers, after all, had died when Neville was born, which was completely different, and she could not begin to imagine having a father who did not talk to her. It made her understand Noël’s contempt for family life, his dislike of parents, of children, of the institution of marriage even. When she asked Fenella why, since he so much disapproved of the last, he had married her, she said simply that he was a conscientious objector, and it had been to prevent her being called up. ‘I’ve been reading the papers,’ he had said one morning, ‘and I think I’d better marry you.’ This seemed to Clary to be the most incredibly sophisticated proposal she had ever heard of, and she received the account of it in respectful silence. How had they met? she had asked at last. He had advertised for a secretary for the literary agency, and she had replied to it, gone to see him, and been engaged. He had rented a top-floor flat in Bedford Square, where he lived and worked, and shortly afterwards Fenella had moved in with him. It was hard to see, Clary thought, how he had ever managed without her. She not only did all his typing, she cooked, washed his shirts, cleaned the house (he did not like the idea of anyone coming in to clean it), but she accompanied him on his vast walks about London or the countryside, read aloud with him until well after midnight every night and then made his last meal of the day – yoghurt, bread and butter and a glass of hot milk – which he usually took in bed, where he stayed for breakfast the next morning. He liked to breakfast early. Fenella said, and to read the papers in bed before he got up. This meant, Clary knew, that Fenella did not get much sleep, and indeed she had admitted once that on the occasions when Noël took women friends to the theatre or opera, she usually went to bed early and slept until his return. Unlike Noël, who was small and wirily thin with very thick gold-rimmed spectacles, Fenella was large, with big bones, a matronly figure and huge hazel eyes – her best feature – that sparkled with intelligence. Noël, she had told Clary, was the most remarkable and interesting man she had ever met. If this was true for Fenella, who was middle-aged, at least thirty-five and probably more, obviously it must be true for her. Her life was now split into two distinct halves: life with Noël and Fenella, and life with Polly and the family; and sometimes she felt as though she was becoming two different people – the old Clary, who was playing house with her best friend and cousin, who had had the magic joy of Dad’s return from France and who had now got used to it enough to start worrying that he seemed changed and, she felt, was not happy, and the new Clary who was being educated in a thorough, serious manner about practically everything. Each day with the Formans opened up new vistas of her ignorance. Information, about the arts, the paranormal, transport, history, disease – Noël seemed to know what any famous people mentioned had died of – the state of footpaths, canals, railways in England, the cost of Elizabethan sweetmeats, how coracles were constructed, the dying words of an astonishing variety of famous men, the eccentricities of others – Nietzsche and his cream buns, Savarin and his oysters, a millionaire in the Isle of Man who played cargo ships with a map of the world and real ships that he owned … Facts, extraordinary, improbable (though she did not question them) streamed from him in an apparently ceaseless flow. He seemed to know perhaps not all but something about everything, and, of course, as she lived with him, Fenella was pretty knowledgeable as well. But what was so wonderful was that, although she knew so little, they treated her absolutely as an equal, a serious adult like themselves – in fact they often evinced an amused surprise when she said that she did not know what Blue John was or who had founded St George’s Hospital or on whose novel Traviata was based. All that part of it was exciting, and she enjoyed Noël dictating letters to her as she typed, using amazing words she’d never heard of, like desuetude or flume. At twelve thirty they would send her to the post office for stamps, or the bank with the firm’s paying-in book, and when she returned Fenella would have lunch ready, nut cutlets – deeply unpopular with Noël so she and Clary had them rather often and he ate Fenella’s meat ration, a chop or cutlet of a more desirable kind, with huge mounds of mashed potato and cabbage or carrots, followed by rice pudding, of which he was extremely fond, and then a cup of rather weak grey coffee. This meal was eaten on the top floor in an attic that must once have been a servant’s bedroom. It was the nicest room in the flat, as the room below it had to serve as an office as well as the sitting room. There was a small room at the back of the office in which Noël and Fenella slept, but she never saw it. The lavatory and small, dark bathroom were on a half-landing below – a bath, for Noël, was a rare and rather menacing event, mentioned several days beforehand as a date that pre-empted much else happening on that day. It was interesting to know somebody who hardly ever bathed, but when she told Polly this, her reaction was sickeningly predictable.

  ‘No, he doesn’t!’ she had retorted. ‘That’s the whole point. He’s just as clean as anyone else.’

  ‘What about Fenella, then?’ Polly had asked.

  ‘I don’t know about her.’

  She didn’t, she realized: she knew hardly anything. Fenella, when she was alone with Clary – which was not often – talked only of Noël. She seemed to have no family, no discernible background. When Clary asked her what she had done before she met Noël, she had answered vaguely that she had been a private secretary to a more or less retired playwright. But she couldn’t have been born doing that, Clary thought, she must have had parents and gone to school and lived somewhere … She asked Noël one day about this. ‘Fen’s parents? They weren’t much cop. Her father died of drink and her mother committed suicide. You know what parents are. A there biological necessity, if you ask me.’

  She had remembered then that when her father had come back from France and she had presented them with this amazing news, they had been only politely interested, and after lunch Fenella had said that talking about France depressed Noël and so it was better to avoid the subject. ‘It’s because he wants to go to America, you see,’ she had (hardly) explained. And Clary, who felt that she ought to understand what was meant and didn’t, shut up after that.

  Noël sensibilities were as numerous as they were extreme, and this meant that conversation was fraught with traps. His favourite theme was how much better everything used to be, and they could be comfortably and nostalgically ensconced in the nineteenth century and he would be advising her to read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians when Cardinal Newman – one of the subjects – would pop into his mind, his face would cloud over and he would fall utterly silent. Anything to do with religion was dangerous, she discovered, because he was afraid that there might, after all, be a God, some vengeful deity who would certainly consign him to Hell. Then Fenella would coax him, would go out and buy teacakes, would, after Clary had been sent home early, settle down to some soothing read of Bertrand Russell, or Mencken, or Erich Fromm.

  Noël had been most helpful when she and Polly had been looking for somewhere to live – well, he had not actually been helpful in the end, but he had made some interesting suggestions of a romantic nature such as choosing a street with a name that she liked: Shelley, he said, had chosen Poland Street for that reason; or they might look into the possibility of taking one of the towers of Tower Bridge – think of the amazing view from its windows. But it had turned out that the towers were full of the machinery for lifting the bridge, and, anyway, it seemed to be miles from anywhere and Polly didn’t think she would like it. She had chosen Floral Street in Covent Garden as a desirable name; there was nothing going there, but the agents in Covent Garden turned out to have this house on their books so perhaps he had been helpful in an oblique way.

  The best thing about the Formans was that they took her writing seriously. She had shown Noël a half-written story about two people who met as children, and then had separate lives until they were grown-up when they were to meet again and fall in love. It was Noël who pointed out to her that she would no
t be able to deal interestingly with this idea in a short story but that in the space afforded by a novel she could make all kinds of interesting things happen. ‘For instance,’ he had said, ‘both of them being in the same place at the same time but not knowing it. Turning out to have shared an experience – like some great performance, say – that affects them differently.’ He had also given her a fierce and detailed lesson on her misuse of the pluperfect, and discouraged her use of exclamation marks, quoting Cleopatra to her in the process. This had made her want to call her novel The Visiting Moon, but he had said finish it and then see what it is called. She had been struggling on with it in evenings and at weekends, but it had not gone at all well until Dad came back, which had somehow released some block in her and for the last two months she had written nearly half the book. In fact, Noël had been rather disapproving at her sudden output: he spent hours himself battling with abstruse critical pieces for highbrow magazines or, and more surprisingly, semi-amateur specialist publications – he was extremely fond of trams, for instance, and wrote an impassioned piece on their superior merits. He would take one or two weeks to produce a piece and she learned not to boast of having written ten pages in a weekend as Fenella said it depressed him. She spent an evening with Dad every week. He and Zoë were going to move back to London in the autumn and meanwhile he was staying with Archie, so she only ever saw Archie on his own at weekends when she didn’t go home, and even that was tricky, because she worried about Polly still being in love with him. Polly had said that she never wanted to talk about it, a wish that had to be respected, but it also showed, she thought, that Polly still felt pretty shaky. If she was still minding about Archie, it would be far better if she talked about it – but there we go again, she thought, this family is rotten about saying things that matter to them and I suppose Polly’s caught the habit. Still, if they weren’t like that, I probably wouldn’t have thought of making one of my main people like my family in that way, and the other one not. After that, she thought about the novel until she fell asleep.

  Neville arrived just after ten the next morning saying that he’d come to breakfast.

  ‘You can’t have! You’re far too late. I bet you had some at home before you left,’ she added.

  ‘Only a snack. Just four bits of toast.’

  ‘We only had toast, and we didn’t have four bits.’

  ‘Mrs Cripps gave me these for you.’ It was a box containing six eggs. ‘I’ve brought them all the way up, so surely I could have one of them now,’ he said when they had exclaimed over them.

  ‘Give him one,’ Polly said. ‘Journeys do make people hungry.’

  ‘It is hard for me to think of anything,’ Neville said, ‘that doesn’t make me hungry. Of course some things are worse than others.’

  ‘You can’t be hungry just after a meal.’

  ‘After an hour I am,’ he said simply. ‘It’s hardly surprising. Do you know what we’re supposed to have each week? One egg, two pints of milk, half a pound of any meat, four ounces of bacon, two ounces of tea, four ounces of sugar, four ounces of sausage, two ounces of butter, two ounces of lard, four ounces of margarine, three ounces of cheese and a small amount of offal. And at school we don’t even get that. I got some scales and did a controlled experiment for a week. The meat was Irish stew and one and a half ounces of it was bones, the sausages are nearly all bread and some foul-tasting herb, the egg tasted of prayer books. I had to go without sugar all the week in order to weigh it up and of course it was nothing like four ounces—’

  ‘They would have been cooking with some of your ration,’ Polly interrupted, ‘and you aren’t counting the things you can get on points. Who would be eating your rations anyway?’

  ‘The masters. Mr Fothergill, particularly. He’s unspeakably fat and his sister sends him homemade sweets as well as him reeking of drink. Sometimes.’

  ‘Here’s your egg.’

  ‘Jolly good. Much better than the dried ones.’

  From this careless remark they discovered that he had had breakfast on the train.

  ‘Honestly, Neville! You are a cheat! Two breakfasts already.’

  ‘There is a worryingly dishonest streak in you,’ Clary added.

  ‘There is not. I simply didn’t mention it. I forgot until now. The point is that I’m extremely hungry. If you want me to work for you the least you can do is keep me from starving to death.’

  In fact, he painted rather surprisingly well and undercoated all of Clary’s larger room so they didn’t grudge him two enormous bacon sandwiches at lunch-time plus two iced buns that Polly had got from the baker. The sandwiches used up all their bacon for the week, but Polly sometimes got extra bits from Mr Southey who kept the shop below. The buns had been meant for tea so they had to go and get more of them for that. ‘He’s grown so terrifically in the last year, we can’t grudge him,’ Polly said. In the evening they took him to A Night at the Circus, which was on at a cinema in Notting Hill Gate, and then they had macaroni cheese and cocoa. The whole house now smelled of paint, which made a change from poultry and burnt feathers. On Sunday he said he was going to see Archie, so he’d only be able to paint in the morning. ‘But I might easily be back for supper.’

  He loomed over them – a head taller than Clary now – nearly knocking things over, asking for things: ‘I forgot my toothpaste,’ ‘Can I borrow that scarf, then I needn’t wear a tie?’ and so on.

  ‘It’s amazing that you clean your teeth,’ Clary said, as he squeezed two inches of toothpaste in a double row on his battered brush.

  ‘I used simply to eat it. But ever since I saw Mr Fothergill’s teeth I’ve cleaned them like mad. He never cleans them. They’re like those very old yellowy almonds you get on fruit cakes.’ His voice no longer veered about between squeaking and rumbling. When he raised his head to sloosh his mouth out, she saw that his Adam’s apple was just like Dad’s. He was still in his pyjamas. The jacket had no buttons left on it and his bony elbows stuck out from holes in the sleeves. All of his clothes looked a bit like that: the grey flannel trousers he had arrived in had turn-ups that were well above his ankles which were flimsily covered by a matted network of much-darned socks that in turn were encased in huge blackish shoes. These last he wore as little as possible, removing them on arrival and only wedging his feet back into them to go to the cinema. ‘The laces broke ages ago you see, so I can’t undo them. It honestly doesn’t matter,’ he said, sensing their disapproval.

  He top-coated both Polly’s windows still in his pyjamas and then disappeared to dress. When he had gone, they discussed him.

  ‘He’s just like Simon was,’ Polly said.

  ‘I think he’s worse.’ Clary was thinking of his hopelessly frivolous answers to their questions about what he was going to do when he’d finished school. ‘I’d quite like to own a nightclub,’ he had said. ‘Stay up all night and make tons of money.’

  ‘Is that all you want to do?’

  ‘Not quite all. I want to enjoy myself, of course. I might own a theatre, or be a conductor of an orchestra just for fun.’

  ‘Don’t you want to do anything for other people?’ As soon as she had said that, she realized how priggish it sounded. Too late. He had looked at her for a moment and then said blandly, ‘I don’t want to do good to people: I want to be done good to.’

  ‘It’s our fault,’ Polly said. ‘We’ve started having the sort of conversations with him that boring old grown-ups used to have with us.’

  ‘He does love Archie, though.’ Another thing she wished she hadn’t said.

  But Polly, who was struggling to open a tin of Spam, simply said, ‘Well, Archie sort of became his father, didn’t he? While Uncle Rupert was away.’

  When Neville reappeared, wanting the scarf he’d borrowed from Polly properly tied round his neck, they both became bossy and maternal with him: Clary tried to get him to polish his shoes a bit, and Polly made an effort to comb his extremely thick hair which stood up in tufts round his double cro
wn – useless, the comb broke almost at once and teeth from it and from some alien comb, since they were a different colour, emerged.

  ‘Your hair is absolutely revolting! What on earth have you been doing to it?’

  ‘Or not doing to it,’ Clary added: she had been watching.

  ‘I don’t do things to it. They cut it sometimes. And I put Brylcreem on it when someone lends me some. There’s no point in trying to comb it. As long as it looks shiny, they don’t make you wash it. We tried that oil you get in a little can for stopping things squeaking but it tends to stink. Brylcreem’s much better. There’s no point in you rolling your eyes at each other – it’s my hair.’

  He went after that, but all the rest of that day, while they finished the top-coating of Clary’s room, took it in turns to have baths and had boiled eggs and Spam in the hot kitchen, from whose window they watched two then fighting each other with knives in the hot dusty street below, the thought of Archie lay, unmentioned, between them.