The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  ‘I’m not hopping,’ she said. He was making her feel grudging and sulky, which she hated. They had parted company for the afternoon. He went off to paint by the canal, and she collected branches that had fallen from the trees on to the piece of woodland garden where all the snowdrops had been and primroses were to come. All the time she was doing this she felt worse and worse about him. She thought of how kind he had been, how he had looked after her, how he had found this cottage and supported her living in it, encouraged her to write her book – really done every single thing for her for months and months. She thought of how good he had been with Neville when their father was still away; how tactful he had been with Polly when she was in love with him. He was the kindest and best person she had ever met. And there she was, making difficulties about doing one thing the way he wanted her to.

  When she went back into the cottage, he was standing at the kitchen sink washing his brushes.

  ‘I want to apologize,’ she said. ‘I was foul to you. Of course I won’t tell Dad about our life. If he asks me I shall simply say that you have been terrifically kind – like a sort of second father to me.’

  There was a silence. He did not turn round, but eventually she heard his croaky laughter, so she felt things were all right.

  She went to London for the night, which she spent with Dad and Zoë in their rather grand new flat that looked on to Ladbroke Square. They both seemed very pleased to see her, and Juliet rushed in from playing in the square to give her a hug.

  ‘You’ve grown your hair long!’ she cried. ‘You’re grown-up. Why aren’t you wearing lipstick? Mummy, a boy called Hastings is coming to stay because he’s running away.’

  ‘Why is he running away?’

  ‘His parents are very cruel to him. He stood on a wall ’cos he wanted to jump off it and they didn’t want him to so when he jumped, they spoiled it and caught him! I’m going to be a bridesmaid at Polly’s wedding! If you come to it you’ll see me in a long dress, and probably –’ her voice dropped and slowed dramatically ‘– I almost surely … perhaps … may be … wearing lipstick. A bit.’

  Zoë bore Jules off and Dad took her upstairs to the drawing room for a drink.

  ‘Let’s have a good look at you,’ he said. ‘You look quite different since I last saw you – although, heaven knows, that’s far too long ago. You’ve got very thin.’

  ‘Have I? I didn’t notice.’

  ‘It suits you. What have you been doing? Archie told me that you were writing.’

  She told him about the book. Well, not about it, but about doing it. Then – he brought it up – he asked her how she was managing about money, and she told him that she hadn’t got any. ‘I haven’t even paid Polly for the rent for the flat,’ she said (a thought that had only recently occurred to her).

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’m paying it for Neville. He seems to like staying there – doesn’t want to be here, and it seemed sensible.’

  ‘Oh.’ How could she ask him for more money after that?

  ‘But that’s another matter. You must be needing some for yourself, though. I suppose Archie has been subsidizing you. We can’t let him go on doing that. He’s probably saved a bit from his job, but he told me that he was thinking of giving that up, then he’ll be off to France and he’ll need what he’s saved to get started again. It’s the devil going back to something like painting when you haven’t been doing it for years.’

  ‘Did he tell you he was going to France?’

  ‘He said he was thinking about it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, darling, I don’t know when! Sometime in the autumn, I think, after he’d found that cottage for you. I seem to remember that he said the cottage was dirt cheap – twenty-five pounds a year. Are you going to stay in it after you’ve finished your book?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was suddenly feeling so frightened that she couldn’t concentrate on what Dad was saying. If Archie was going, why hadn’t he told her? All he had said, months ago, was that he hadn’t decided. So had he changed his mind?

  ‘It was just before Christmas, I remember now.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘When Archie talked about France. Clary! Do listen to me! What I propose is …’

  The rest of the evening, although she tried to conceal it, she felt completely desperate. Zoë arrived to say that Juliet wanted her to say goodnight, and she went downstairs to Juliet’s bedroom. It’s probably a mistake, she thought, as she went, a misunderstanding. He wouldn’t lie to me.

  ‘Mummy said you live in a cottage? Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. I shall live in a boat. Or an aeroplane. Yes, an aeroplane because I don’t want to have a garden and weeding to do. You’re my sister, aren’t you? Sort of?’

  ‘Yes, I am. We have the same dad.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘She died.’ She found that she could say that as though she was talking about somebody else.

  Juliet flung her arms round her and she was tightly squeezed. ‘I’m very, very, very sorry for you.’

  ‘It’s all right, Jules. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose it’s gone into history. We do history at my school and people die all the time. They keep doing it, and then we have to learn about a new person.’

  She went back on the train next morning. She should have felt relieved. Dad was giving her an allowance of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and he produced two hundred at once to pay Archie back. ‘You’ll probably have to get some sort of job, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy to live on writing books to begin with. Come back soon. Don’t disappear again.’

  Archie met her at the station. He bent to kiss her, but she turned her face so that he only got her ear.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up. Dad is giving me an allowance. And he sent you this cheque to pay you back for all the money you’ve spent on me.’

  ‘I’ve hardly spent any money on you.’

  She didn’t want to have it out with him while they were in the car, so she didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said, as he dumped the shopping he had done on the kitchen table, ‘we’ll buy you some new clothes. You badly need some. I’m getting rather sick of those two torn old jerseys and those baggy corduroys.’

  ‘Well, when you go to France, you won’t have to see them any more, will you?’

  ‘Oh! That’s what it is! Clary! You are one for making mountains out of molehills.’

  ‘I’m not! It isn’t you going that I mind particularly, it’s you not telling me. Telling other people, and not me.’

  ‘I didn’t. I haven’t.’

  ‘Dad said you did, so don’t try to get out of it.’

  ‘He asked me if I was going back – no, he said, “I suppose you’ll be going back”, and I said that I hadn’t decided, but I might.’

  ‘To live there?’

  ‘Well, yes. If I go back I’ll expect to do a spot of living.’

  ‘Don’t be facetious! You see, you are serious about it. And I notice,’ she added, and could not stop her voice from trembling, ‘that you don’t ask me.’

  ‘Whether I may go? No, I don’t.’

  ‘No! Whether I would like to go with you.’

  There was a dead silence. He was leaning against the sink, his back to the light. She could not see his face. She was sitting on the kitchen table fiddling with a paperback from the shopping basket.

  ‘I couldn’t stay in this cottage alone,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t be here all by myself for months and months. I’d go mad with – with nobody to talk to! Surely you can see that!’

  He walked over to the table suddenly, put his hands on her shoulders, and then, surprisingly, folded his arms.

  ‘You could go back to London,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to get some other work to support you while you write. For a bit, anyway.’

  ‘I
know about that,’ she said. She felt her eyes filling with tears. ‘I know I’ve got to find a job, and I will. It’s just – I don’t think I can do anything if you simply aren’t there. You tell me what to do, you see. And then I can do it.’

  ‘You’ve got accustomed to having two fathers.’

  ‘I suppose I have.’

  ‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘you’ve got to grow up. You’ve got to stand on your own feet. One father is quite enough for most people.’

  ‘Why did you look after me if that’s what you think?’

  ‘Because you were in a bad way. But you’re not now, you’re over that and ready for the next thing.’

  ‘What next thing?’

  ‘Oh! You’ll find a nicer man than that ghastly Number One, and fall in love like a normal grown-up girl. Now stop snivelling and help me get lunch.’

  ‘I don’t want any lunch,’ she said, and could hear herself sounding like a sulking child, and felt angrier and more despairing than ever.

  ‘Well, I do.’

  So she peeled potatoes and washed lettuce, and nobody said anything. When she had put the potatoes on to boil, she went upstairs to change out of her London clothes – her only skirt and a flannel shirt that had belonged to Archie. Then she put on her cotton trousers and one of Dad’s old shirts and didn’t comb her hair. Trying to tell her not to be dependent and then saying, ‘We’ll buy some new clothes!’ Trying to have it both ways. If he thought she would muck about with her appearance just to please him, he could think again. She could perfectly well get a job, not live here or at Blandford Street; she could start all over again. However awful life was it kept on going on. It was not a comforting thought. She took off the shirt and put on her holiest jersey. There is never really another person, she thought, only yourself.

  When she went down again (which she found quite difficult – her dignity felt dangerously precarious, but she was bloody well not going to break down and ‘snivel’, as he called it), he looked up from mashing the potatoes and said quietly, ‘Clary. I would never do something like make plans to go away behind your back. If you thought that, then I apologize.’ And he looked at her and seemed quite friendly again.

  For weeks after that she worked and worked – or rather reworked. She had become perfectionist: nothing she wrote seemed quite right or good enough, and she became obsessed with getting at least the first chapter right.

  And then, in April, he announced that he was going to Home Place for the weekend. He had come back from one of his visits to London, which he made most weeks, and he told her during supper.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the Duchy asked me. Edward and his new lady are being invited together for the first time, and she asked me to be there.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You could invite Poll for the weekend. I’m sure she’d like to come.’

  ‘I could if I wanted to, of course.’ She thought about it: having anyone, any outsider, would mean that she couldn’t work.

  ‘It would do you good to have a couple of days off,’ he said, as though he knew what she was thinking.

  ‘It wouldn’t. I’ll ask her when I’ve finished the book.’

  So he had gone, and it felt very strange. She spent one morning reading all that she had written, and then decided to copy out the first chapter on the second-hand typewriter that he had given her for Christmas. If it was typed, she felt, she might be able to see it better. But when she had done that, it still didn’t seem right. She felt despair, and on Sunday evening she decided that she would show it to Archie – get him to read it and see how it struck him. If he says it’s absolutely no good, I’ll have to stop, she thought. But at least I’ll know.

  He came back in good spirits. Yes, he had had a very nice time. Her father had been there, and Teddy with his incredible wife. She asked about Uncle Edward’s new lady, and he said that she seemed anxious to please, and he supposed she was all right as far as she went. ‘Which wouldn’t be far enough for me,’ he had added.

  After supper she gave him the typed chapter. ‘I really want to know what you honestly think,’ she said. ‘Because if you don’t think it’s any good, I’d rather know and I’ll stop.’

  He had looked up suddenly from the papers she had put into his hand and said, ‘Of course I will be honest with you, Clary, but you must remember that it will only be my opinion – not some cosmic edict. You mustn’t take too much notice.’

  She could not bear to be in the room with him while he was reading it, so she went and washed her hair. When she came back to dry it in front of the fire, he had finished.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, there’s some very good writing in it. Some of it almost felt too good.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘As though you are more concerned with how you are doing something than what it is you are doing. I like the simpler bits best. Tell me what you wanted to have in this bit. I mean, what you wanted me – the reader – to end up knowing.’

  She told him. It didn’t take long, seemed quite small and clear.

  ‘Yes, well, that all seems quite right. But sometimes you have obscured that by getting too elaborate about it. Take the bit where Mary Anne realizes that her father isn’t interested in her. That’s a shock. I don’t think she would think about what the room looked like and her earliest memories of everything else just then. I think she would be too upset by what her father had said. But, that’s only a minor criticism. It reads as though you have had a number of second thoughts and so the feeling has got a bit lost. I think.’

  ‘In the first draft I just said: “So she was not loved.” That was it.’

  ‘You see? That’s far better. The feeling is there. Goodness, I’m no literary critic. Could I see your first draft?’

  ‘You won’t be able to read my writing.’

  ‘I think I can just about manage it.’

  But she said she would type it out for him.

  When he had read it and said he thought it was better, and why, she felt enormous relief.

  ‘Oh, Archie! That does cheer me! I was afraid you were just going to say it was bad in a different way.’

  ‘And what would you have done then?’

  ‘Don’t know. Given up, I expect.’

  ‘Don’t let me ever hear you say that. If you’re going to make writing your life, you’ve got to start depending on your own judgement. You may take notice of other people, but ultimately, it’s what you think is right that’s right.’

  ‘You often ask me what I think of your painting.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d still go on doing it whatever you said.’

  She thought of all the times when he had shown her paintings and drawings accompanied by his own disparaging remarks about them, about the innumerable, often absurd, alternative careers that he then devised for himself when he said that he would throw in the sponge.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Nothing. I think in some ways we’re rather the same.’

  Archie was painting a lot now. He took some pictures to London to show to galleries and came back rather gloomy. Only one had been at all interested, he said; it was the one where he had had a show before the war, and they wouldn’t give him one although they said they would take a couple of landscapes to put in a mixed show.

  ‘Well, that’s a start,’ she said.

  ‘I can hardly live on it, though, can I?’

  ‘We are living,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Just. But, of course, I’m expecting you to be a combination of Agatha Christie and Jane Austen and make thousands, while I shall simply be frightfully good – like van Gogh – and hardly make a penny.’

  ‘Funny. I was planning for you to be Mabel Lucie Atwell or Burne-Jones while I was Virginia Woolf.’

  This became a game she enjoyed where insults – elaborate and oblique – could be exchanged.

  Then, at the beginning of June, everything went wrong. Afterwards, when she tried to think what
had started it, she could only come up with rather petty things, like it being a heat wave and Archie saying he hadn’t been sleeping well. What happened was that she’d put the kettle on for breakfast before having a bath and then she’d forgotten about it. Archie was out painting a picture he worked at before breakfast on fine days, so he didn’t smell the burning. Anyway, she finally smelt it, and tying her bath towel round her, ran down to the kitchen to find black smoke. She turned off the stove, and then, without thinking, she tried to pick up the kettle and, of course, burned herself. She cried out with the pain and went to the kitchen sink to put her hand under water and in doing this, her bath towel slipped and fell on the ground. So when Archie, who had heard her cry of pain, came into the kitchen, she was naked. He found the tube of tannic acid and made her pat her hand dry while he tucked the bath towel round her and then dressed her hand. It was quite a bad burn: the skin was going to come off. In spite of this, he seemed almost cross with her, saying she was bloody careless and – not quite saying it – implying that it served her right. He put on a saucepan for boiling water – the kettle was ruined – and said for goodness sake go up and put some clothes on. Not at all the way that she would have behaved if he had burned himself getting their breakfast. But when she pointed this out to him, he snapped at her again, saying that they didn’t feel the same about a lot of things, although he absolutely refused to say what.

  That evening he announced that he was going to go away for a bit. ‘I want to sort things out,’ he said, ‘and I think you should too.’

  And while she was wondering what he meant, he said, ‘Well, we can’t go on like this for ever.’

  ‘Why can’t we?’

  ‘Clary, for God’s sake, grow up! I’ve got to make a decision about my flat in London – and France. I can’t possibly afford both, which is more or less what I’m doing now. And you’ve got to learn to cope with your own life and not depend on another person for everything.’

  ‘I can cope.’

  ‘Good. Well, you won’t have any trouble while I’m away, then.’

  ‘Are you going to stay in France?’

  ‘I might. Haven’t decided. But part of the deal is that I don’t have to tell you where I am. Nor you me.’