The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  He realized then that he had been so taken up by Rachel that he had hardly thought about the Duchy.

  ‘Did she have a happy marriage?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. He knew nothing about that marriage, he discovered, and remembered now that he had hardly ever heard them talk to each other. They had seemed to have little in common beyond their children and descendants. Their interests had hardly coincided: she loved gardening; he was passionate about forestry; she adored music which left him unmoved; he had loved to ride and shoot, to go to his club, to entertain all kinds of people, to eat and to drink – particularly good burgundy and port; she had no other outdoor interests beyond her garden, hardly ever left either of her houses except to go to a concert or to deal with a difficulty about housekeeping; she seemed to have no friends outside the family, condemned nearly all food as too rich and drank nothing. Ever since he had known them, they had slept in separate rooms. On the face of it, it would hardly seem to have been either a very close or happy arrangement. And yet, perhaps preserved by Victorian veils of a discretion that almost amounted to secrecy, it had not been unhappy. There had never seemed to be that uncomfortable, airless vacuum in which mysterious tensions could suspend themselves that he associated with unhappy or difficult marriages. The household had jogged along with that pair at its head and he felt sure that, like himself, nobody in it had ever questioned how the couple who had instigated it had got on with one another.

  ‘You are lucky to have such a large family.’

  ‘They aren’t my family. They sort of took me in, in the war. Before that I was at art school with one of the sons and we became friends.’

  ‘I never knew you went to an art school!’

  He shrugged and then felt ashamed of himself because it showed that he didn’t particularly care what she didn’t know about him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to be somewhere.’

  He knew that he needed to talk to her seriously and that the canteen at lunch-time was hardly the place, but meanwhile he was finding it difficult to talk to her about anything.

  ‘She must have been extremely beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘So I expect she minds, anyway, about being so old.’

  ‘Don’t think so. She’s never cared in the least about her appearance.’

  ‘Anyway, you said she has a daughter. That must be a comfort to her.’

  He agreed.

  After they had parted, having made an arrangement for the film they were to see together, and he had gone back to his office, he wondered whether, perhaps, the Brig and the Duchy’s marriage had sustained itself at Rachel’s expense. It had seemed taken for granted that she should do everything for her father – even things that one might have expected his wife to do for him.

  He had a meeting with his boss mid-afternoon and found him in a state of indignation, fulminating, as usual, against the Government.

  ‘Attlee must be mad! If we withdraw our forces from Egypt, those wogs will take the canal from under our noses. And then where will we all be?’

  ‘I suppose it is their canal, sir,’ he ventured, but was shot down at once.

  ‘Nonsense! Nothing of the sort! Do you know how much money the Egyptian government put into the building of it? Ten thousand pounds! How much canal do you think that would pay for?’ He glared at Archie with his burning blue eyes.

  ‘They say that they’re leaving adequate defence of the canal, sir.’

  Commander Carstairs snorted. ‘We all know what that means. Just enough personnel to call for help after the balloon’s gone up. You mark my words, this government’s hell-bent on giving everything away. Empire will go to pieces – look at India! These bloody Socialists will see to it that we shall emerge in the next ten years as a second-class power, but they won’t care a damn. Five years of them and we shall be back where we were in 1937, without enough of an army or navy to say boo to a goose.’ (He did not like the RAF, Archie knew, so it usually got left out of his calculations.)

  The trouble with then like him was that they had been trained to go to sea, to command in a ship, and when they were reduced to sitting in an office and paperwork, they became crusty and hidebound from frustration.

  He let Carstairs rumble on until he reached the every-man-in-the-country-will-have-a-suit-and-own-a-bloody-little-car stage, when it became possible to raise the matter that he had come for in the first place.

  This is what happens, he told himself, if you do something you don’t like every day simply in order to earn enough money to go on doing it, and it’s what I’m doing, and it’s got to stop.

  France. France meant painting – he felt a nervous frisson at the word. He had become so used to regular money, to not experiencing that anxiety and excitement that trying to do something difficult with a fair chance of failing used always to induce. With painting you started something and anything could be there. And as he worked, the gap between what he had seen and what he could show of what he’d seen, widened inexorably, and sometimes to such a degree that the picture was abandoned. Sometimes it seemed worth struggling on, and the result would most often be neither the original vision nor the simple failure of it, but a kind of crafty compromise. Then, occasionally and without warning, he pulled something off … I must get back to it, he thought, wandering restlessly to his balcony window to look, as it did, on to the square.

  It was a windy evening. Blossom was being tossed off the trees to join the browning petals on the ground – it had rained earlier. A small child was listlessly kicking a large rubber ball down one of the straight gravel paths. Square gardens, he thought, were an adult’s view of a nice place for children. They had the appearance of being verdant – grass, lawns, shrubs, trees and a few flowers – but they were so ordered and confined that they contained no sense of adventure, of mystery: it was hard to enjoy something if you could see all of it at once. He had a sudden yearning for those two views from the windows, for the ordered ranks of olives and apricots set in the ruddy earth, the narrow fields of sunflowers or maize, and the greater, more spectacular view from the other side of the house, the valley and the hills beyond with the distant, terraced vines below which the river lay, unseen, but whose course was marked by poplars that grew on its banks. But it was the light he thirsted for – that clear, translucent brightness that slaked the eye and, perhaps best of all, that one could take for granted, day after day. Painting landscape in England, he had quickly discovered, was a nightmare of false starts and procrastination, since the light was hardly ever the same for two days running and, moreover, could change from hour to hour during those days.

  Yes, he would go back, for a short holiday to start with. And he would invite the girls to come with him.

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Archie, but I don’t think I will. I don’t know about Clary – at least, I sort of do know, but you’d better ask her yourself. She’ll be back any minute.’

  She was ironing some piece of sewing and a lock of her chestnut hair had fallen over the side of her face so that he could not see it. She wore a long black cotton skirt below which her feet were bare: they looked as white as alabaster.

  She had made her room astonishingly pretty: the walls were the pale blue of a robin’s egg, the paint was white and the floor was covered with yellow haircord. Her curtains were made of mattress ticking, pale grey and white stripes, and edged with a yellow woollen fringe. Over the mantelpiece she had hung a painting of Rupe’s that he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. It was flanked by two large blue and white Delft china candlesticks, rather cracked, that she had bought when she was a child, reputedly for sixpence.

  ‘You have made this room nice. How are Clary’s quarters getting on?’

  ‘She insisted on red striped paper so they’re rather cross and hot. She’s lost interest in them anyway, so I should think they’ll stay as they are.’

  She finished her ironing, laid it on the divan and began folding up the board.

  ‘I’m sad you don’t want to
come to France.’

  ‘Are you?’

  He began to say that of course he was but she interrupted him. ‘We don’t see you for weeks, and then you turn up here, without the slightest warning – you don’t even ring up – and then you calmly suggest that I should go to France with you! As though – as though I have absolutely no feelings! Or if I have, they simply don’t count! How am I ever—’ The front door slammed loudly downstairs. ‘That’s Clary. You’d better go down and ask her.’ She picked up the ironing board and tramped out of the room with it.

  He was stunned. He’d never seen her so angry, or indeed, seen her angry at all. What was all that about? he started to ask himself, but he knew, and felt ashamed of his crassness. He tore a leaf out of his pocket diary and wrote: ‘Really sorry, Poll. Please forgive’ and propped it on the mantelpiece. Then he went downstairs to find Clary.

  Her door was open and she was on her knees before a chest of drawers: she had cut her hair as short as a boy’s, he noticed.

  ‘It’s me. May I come in?’

  She turned round, and he saw that she had made other changes. Her face was covered with some sort of white makeup, her eyes were sooty with mascara and she wore a lipstick so dark that it was almost black.

  ‘Oh, Archie! Yes, do. Find somewhere to sit if you can. Take those clothes off that chair.’ She got to her feet and there was a splitting sound. ‘Oh, damn! That’s my skirt. It’s always doing it.’

  She wore a tight black skirt, black stockings like a hospital nurse, and a man’s shirt with collar and black tie. It was not a becoming outfit, he thought. He put her pyjamas on to the unmade bed and sat on the chair.

  ‘The trouble is that Poll’s sewing machine only does chain-stitch, so every time I split it, the whole thing comes undone. I’ve got some trousers somewhere. Won’t be a sec.’

  She disappeared through the communicating door that led to her smaller room.

  While he waited for her, he reflected that he had really got rather out of touch with both girls. When they had first moved into their flat, he had come round quite often, taken them out to dinner and to films, but he realized now that, although they had gone out as a threesome and he had occasionally taken Clary by herself, he had not once spent an evening alone with Polly.

  Clary returned, wearing black rather baggy trousers in which, he thought, she looked rather like a clown.

  ‘Are all your clothes black these days?’

  ‘The ones I wear. Have you seen Poll? She usually gets back before me.’

  ‘I have. I came to see whether you would both like to come to France with me – just for a holiday.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to. I’m afraid I rather dropped a brick there. I thought – well, water under the bridge, you know.’

  ‘No. She wouldn’t. Have you got a cigarette?’

  ‘Didn’t know you’d taken to smoking.’

  ‘Oh, well – it helps.’ The mascara made her eyes look enormous. When he had lit it for her, she sat on the floor opposite him and pushed a large pottery ashtray between them.

  ‘I’m afraid she still thinks she’s in love with you. So seeing you is purely masochistic.’

  ‘Oh dear. What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Well – everything what. Why do you wear those funny clothes? How’s your job? How are you? I feel really out of touch. Oh, and how about France?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t come to France for the same reason.’

  He stared at her in dismay. ‘Oh, God, Clary! You aren’t secretly in love with me.’

  This made her laugh. ‘Oh, really, Archie,’ she said, in the middle of laughing. ‘What an idiotic idea! As if I would be! It’s a bit conceited of you even to think that, isn’t it?’

  ‘It was you who said you couldn’t come for the same reason.’

  ‘Yes. I can’t, because I’m in love – with someone else. It’s funny that shouldn’t have occurred to you.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ he said. He felt dashed: of course it was. ‘Tell me about him, Clary. What does he do? How did you meet him?’

  She told him. It was the man she worked for. He was called Noël and he was married.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t believe in marriage anyway. Nor does he. He only married Fenella for practical reasons. She’s a marvellous person. She quite understands about Noël and me. In fact, he needs both of us. He’s desperately unhappy, you see. He hates everything about the modern world. He’s the most extraordinary, intelligent, gifted person I’ve ever met in my life. He knows the most incredible amount about everything. He’s sort of trying to educate me. He has the most amazing energy – after you’ve been with him for even two days, you feel exhausted. That’s not just me. Fenella feels like it as well. He hardly needs any sleep, you see, and when he’s awake things are always happening. So I sort of share him with her.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have any other friends?’

  ‘Not many. He doesn’t like then much, you see. He says women are far nicer and more sensitive and intelligent.’

  ‘It all sounds rather serious and gloomy.’

  ‘Well, life is gloomy. Despairing, really. One just has to make the best of it.’

  ‘Any jokes?’ he asked – hopelessly, he was pretty sure that there wouldn’t be.

  ‘Noël says that wit is one thing – he’s all for wit, like Oscar Wilde, for instance. But silly jokes, he says, are just a way of covering things up. Like my family does all the time.’

  ‘Not all the time, Clary.’

  ‘I mean, a way of not facing things. Look at Uncle Edward and Aunt Villy! That’s a perfect example of the futility of marriage and not facing things.’

  ‘I think there might be other reasons for that.’

  ‘Well, sex, of course. Noël says that sex is fearfully important, but it doesn’t ever last. He says romantic people understand this. You have to be prepared for everything to go wrong. Noël’s a romantic. He says you can’t have a serious relationship with someone and have children and be financially dependent – all that. You have to be prepared to risk things – and suffer if you have to.’

  ‘Gosh!’ Everything she said so appalled him that he recognized the need for extreme caution.

  ‘Are you – happy with him?’

  ‘Not happy!’ she replied with scorn. ‘Not merely happy! I’m simply completely, utterly in love with him. It’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.’

  ‘Darling Clary. I’m glad you’ve told me. Do you think that as about the thirty-second best thing that could happen to you, you would have dinner with me?’

  She said she would. She’d just go and tell Poll and see if she wanted to come as well. Do, he replied.

  Polly wouldn’t come. He took Clary to a small Cypriot place near Piccadilly.

  ‘We came here on VE night, do you remember?’

  ‘So we did.’

  ‘You told me a bit about Noël then.’

  ‘Did I?’

  All the black lipstick was gone by the time she had finished her kebab. She ate a lot and was glowing with the pleasure of having told him. With her short hair and her white face and black-rimmed eyes, she looked like a marmoset, he told her. She had beautiful eyes, he added, in case she thought likeness to a marmoset was frivolous – currently her most damning word.

  ‘I’ve got thinner as well,’ she said.

  ‘You certainly have. Thin enough, I think.’

  ‘I eat a lot. But Noël likes to go for tremendously long walks, and then he likes to read aloud until quite late at night. He dictates letters all the morning – he and Fenella run a literary agency and I’m being the secretary. And then we have lunch, which Fenella cooks, and we work all the afternoon. Every other weekend I go away with him … Sometimes I get a bit sleepy and tired. But Fen does too,’ she added defensively. ‘That’s why it’s sensible for us to share.’

&nb
sp; ‘What about your writing? How’s that going?’

  ‘Not awfully fast. The days I’m not working, I seem not to feel like it. And Noël has been over my book and he says a lot of it is no good so I had to start again. The trouble is that I only have the weekends I’m not with him for proper writing, and there always seems such a lot to do – you know, washing my clothes, and cleaning up the house with Poll. And if I do get going then it’s Monday again and I’m back at work. Noël finds writing frightfully difficult too. He’s told me to write in the night, but then I just get too sleepy.’

  ‘What does your father think about all this?’

  ‘Dad? I haven’t told him. Please don’t you. Poll knows, of course, but nobody else. I don’t think anyone would understand.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said cautiously. ‘I want you to be happy. Are you?’

  ‘Happy!’ she said with contempt. ‘That isn’t at all the point. He isn’t happy, so how can I be? He’s afraid of going mad, you see. And the only thing that keeps him from that is me. And Fenella too, of course. He needs me. That’s the point.’

  As he was taking her home, he said casually, ‘Could I meet him? I should like to.’

  ‘Afraid not. He’s said he doesn’t want to meet any of my family.’

  ‘I’m not family, Clary, I’m your friend.’

  ‘It comes to the same thing. He simply doesn’t want anything about the rest of my life to come between us.’

  He was silent. Nothing that he wanted to say seemed sayable.

  ‘I can feel you disapproving, Archie. I wish you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t approve of these awful clothes you’re wearing. Collars and ties? I suppose he wants you to wear them.’

  ‘He prefers women dressed like that. So we do.’

  ‘You and Fenella.’

  ‘Me and Fenella.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, as he said goodnight to her. ‘Just one thing. I’m really honoured that you’ve told me. So will you go on telling me? I mean, whatever happens, will you keep in touch about it?’