The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  They were back. The boys’ room looked on to the street, and she saw Elspeth, the girl she paid to take and fetch them to and from school, at the garden gate. She opened it and they surged through like a high tide. Elspeth waved and turned to walk back to the main road. A good thing she’d paid her and explained that she’d get in touch in the autumn, she thought, as she sped down to let them in.

  ‘We’ve got to pack!’ they shouted. ‘We’ve got to collect everything to pack!’

  ‘Not everything. Just enough for your fortnight in camp. You won’t need everything for that.’

  They looked at each other. ‘Yes, we will.’

  ‘We will because we don’t know what we will want.’

  ‘You’ve got one small case. You can fill that, and that will be it. I’ve packed your clothes.’

  ‘We’ll hardly need any. Mr Partington says there’s a huge lake and we shall go on it most of the time.’

  ‘And in it,’ Henry added.

  ‘You go up and wash for tea.’

  ‘What’s for tea?’

  ‘Baked beans on toast.’

  ‘Oh, Mum! Again!?’

  ‘You love baked beans.’

  ‘We like them,’ Tom conceded. ‘But we have them so often we’ve stopped loving them.’

  ‘I can’t help that. That’s all there is. I’m saving the eggs for your breakfast.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Henry said, following her to the kitchen. ‘We could have the eggs now, and the baked beans for breakfast. It would be just the same.’

  The whole evening was like that. Sometimes she stood firm and sometimes she gave in; they accepted defeat with good humour and success with whoops of joy. They were so excited that she sent them out into the garden after their tea to work off steam. By the time she’d got them in to do their packing, run them a bath and got them into it, the negotiations had quite worn her out. There was a very early start tomorrow – she had to get them to Paddington by eight o’clock – and she still had her own packing to do. She left them in the bath while she cleared up their tea, and when she came back they had got into their pyjamas and were sitting side by side in Tom’s bed, picking a torch to pieces and trying to make it work. Their sandy hair was damp, and they did not seem to have dried themselves much, but they had that look of rosy polished virtue that seemed only to occur just after a bath.

  ‘Henry pretended to be blind,’ Tom said. ‘He could do up his pyjama buttons by feel, but he kept bumping into things. It must take a long time to be blind.’

  ‘A long time to do things,’ Henry agreed. ‘But if people practised every day, then when they were blind it wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘But think of all the other things you’d have to practise,’ she said. ‘Having one leg, like Long John Silver, for instance.’

  ‘Don’t mention him at night, Mum. You know I don’t like it.’

  ‘But it would be fun to pretend having one leg,’ Henry said. ‘Could you swim with one leg, Mum?’

  ‘You could if I held you up,’ Tom said.

  They were so alike, she thought, but the moment either of them spoke she knew which one it was. A lot of the time she knew anyway, but nobody else did. Tom had always protected Henry and Henry always listened to Tom.

  When she had read them another chapter of Bevis, a book they never tired of, and kissed them goodnight, it was well after eight.

  For once she would have liked a drink, she thought, as she went to find something to eat for herself, but she had never been able to afford drink. With her pension, and the salary, she had just about got by, but it had always been a struggle. It was worse with twins, because they always needed new clothes at the same time. She had made her own clothes, and taken the boys home to her parents for holidays. Her mother knitted them all jerseys and her father had paid for her to take a secretarial course after Ken was killed when she was pregnant and it had seemed as good a way as any other of getting from one bleak day to the next. They had had barely a year together, far less if one simply counted his leaves, which was really all the time that they had had. The rest of it had been anxious waiting – except that she was a WRAF and therefore working in the ops room on one of the east coast stations for Bombers. They’d had a heavenly ten days after they were married, but that was the longest time they had ever spent together. Afterwards, it was usually forty-eight hours and, once, a week because he had flu.

  So, of course, he never saw the boys, who were born five months after his death. He had known about them (but not known that it was them); the news that she was to have twins was broken to her about a week before their appearance). By then, of course, she was out of the WRAF, and in a panic about how she was going to be able to manage everything. She had thought that she would get a job as soon as they were weaned, but when it came to the point, she could not get any job that paid enough to pay someone else to look after the babies. Her mother offered to have them, but she could not bear them being so far away, and she felt that going back to live at home was admitting defeat. So she got a few bits of copy-typing that she could do in the evenings at home until the boys were old enough to be going to school, and then she had applied for the job at Cazalets’ – and got it.

  She didn’t feel hungry, so she made a pot of tea and took it up to her bedroom to drink while she packed. This would not take long: she did not have many clothes and most of them were pretty worn out. Her parents had given her the money to buy her outfit for tomorrow and she had chosen a linen mixture in a blue the colour of cornflowers for a very simple suit with a short jacket and longish skirt. She had decided against a hat, and now worried that she should have got one. Too late now. Her friend Charlie was lending her best handbag – a navy blue affair in the most beautiful soft leather that her husband had brought back from Rome. Their husbands had been in the same squadron, but George had survived and become a wing commander – she thought, then, that if Ken had survived he, too, would have reached that rank. His photograph, in a leather frame, stood on the mantelpiece. It had been taken when they were engaged and he was twenty-two, the same age as herself. He was in uniform with his cap slightly askew, nearly smiling but with that look of restless energy, of wanting to get on with whatever might happen next, that she remembered so well. How many times had she looked at this picture and prayed that his death had been too quick for agony? And how many times had she wept because she knew too much to believe that? He was a navigator in a Wellington. They’d gone on a day raid and his plane had been met by fighters well before they reached their target. They’d lost one engine, had had to jettison their bomb load over the North Sea as they limped home on the remaining engine, their rear gunner had been hit, and Ken had gone aft to minister to him. They had reached their home base, had made a clumsy landing. Two of the crew got out in time, before the plane, still laden with fuel, blew up, but Ken had not been one of them. The flight lieutenant who’d served with him had come to tell her about Ken. She remembered she had said, ‘He would have died at once?’ and John had answered, ‘He wouldn’t have known a thing.’ But she always remembered how he did not look at her when he said that. The last, perhaps the very last, old tears came to her eyes. It was time to stop them, to cast off this old grief: it was done and nothing could alter it. She picked up the picture, gave him a kiss, and put it in the case that she would not be taking with her tomorrow. She would keep the picture for the boys.

  ‘Are you excited? You must be,’ Charlie answered herself. She had come to help her dress. She had got the boys off: breakfast, a taxi called from the rank – they loved going in a taxi which happened very rarely. They journeyed to Paddington with the elephant hawk moth caterpillars in a shoe box – its lid spattered with holes – resting on both their knees. A paper bag with spare leaves picked from the back garden that morning was in one twin’s sponge bag. ‘They eat an awful lot, you know, before they pupate,’ Tom had said. They had seemed unconcerned at parting with her, but they had each other, and she was glad they were so simply happy
.

  ‘Have a lovely holiday,’ she had said, as she hugged them both.

  ‘We will,’ Henry had replied.

  ‘You, too, Mum,’ Tom had added, and Henry had nodded.

  ‘If we actually found a rabbit that was tame, could we bring it back?’

  ‘If it really wants to come,’ she said. Then the man who was taking them said they must all get on to the train, so she left.

  Back home, she had a bath, and washed her hair, and then Charlie arrived looking very smart, and bringing a small bunch of yellow and white roses. ‘I’ve made you an egg sandwich,’ she said. ‘I bet you didn’t have breakfast.’

  She thought she would not be able to eat it, but found she could. ‘You are a good friend.’

  ‘I’m just so happy for you. You deserve a really good time for a change. Let me just trim your fringe – it is a tiny bit long.’ She tied a bath towel round Jemima’s neck and snipped across her forehead. ‘That’s better. What about your make-up?’

  ‘I haven’t got anything much. Some lipstick.’

  ‘You need a spot of rouge too. You’re very pale, darling.’

  So Charlie applied the make-up. ‘Nothing will stop you looking about fourteen,’ she said.

  She was dressed, and it was time to go, and Charlie drove her to Kensington.

  ‘He’s twenty-one years older than me,’ she said, as they drove over Campden Hill.

  ‘That doesn’t worry you, does it? Not if you love him.’

  ‘I do love him,’ she said and, as she said it, was flooded with love for him: for his sweetness, his whole-hearted kindness to the boys, the way in which his gentle, haunted expression dissolved to tenderness and fun when he looked at her, his startling sincerity (‘I want always to know what you feel,’ he had said, ‘even if it turns out that we don’t agree, or feel the same about any particular thing, I always want to know it’), his surprising capacity for both love and affection, the sense that his loyalty was boundless, and then the discovery, made once – a few weeks ago – that he was for her the perfect lover, patient, sensitive, delightful and full of ardour. He had asked her whether she wanted to go to bed with him before marrying, had said that it should be her choice. ‘I am quite sure,’ he said, ‘but I would like you to feel the same.’ And so, because she had had lingering fears – she had been celibate since Ken died, had had neither time nor opportunity to be in love, and was afraid that she would disappoint either herself or him – she had agreed. Charlie had had the boys for a night, and he had taken her to an hotel on the river on a hot June evening, and when they were in their room he had said, ‘Let’s go to bed now, and then we’ll have dinner.’ And he had been right about that, because she had felt very strung up. Afterwards, full of a happiness extraordinary to her, she had said how glad she was that he had proposed it that way round. ‘Ah! I didn’t want you to have the chance to feel dogged about it,’ he had said, opening a bottle of champagne – she was amazed at what he could do in that way – and when he handed her a glass he said, ‘Darling Jemima, will you marry me?’ And she had said that, in view of what had happened, she had no alternative, and he had said that he had hoped she would say that. They had drunk the champagne and gone down to dinner, which had been full of joyful plans about this life they were to embark upon.

  And now she was about to embark upon it.

  ‘Oh, yes, I really love him.’

  And Charlie answered, ‘Then there is nothing to worry about. You’ve always been a worrier. Now you’ll have to learn to stop.’

  He was waiting for her at the register office, with his younger brother and his wife who, with Charlie, were to be witnesses. They stood in the small office-like room, and then she laid her hand upon his black silk stump where his hand had been and they walked up to the registrar, who at once began the ceremony. It was over in minutes: he bent to kiss her, and then the others kissed her as well. Their names were signed, she signed her new name for the first time.

  ‘It was over so quickly,’ she said, as she walked with Hugh to his car.

  ‘But the really good, long part has just begun,’ he answered. He stopped in the street. ‘You’re not worrying about the Leaflets, are you? We can send them postcards tonight.’

  ‘I’m not worrying about anything at all,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the world.’

  It was true.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want us to go with you to the station?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  They were all three standing outside the restaurant where his parents had taken him for a farewell lunch. It had not been an easy occasion, but he had realized that it had been far more difficult for them than it was for him, and he had tried his best to keep things on an even keel. He had been calm about his father’s hostile ruminations about his future, and reassuring about his mother’s – he thought – irrelevant and frivolous anxieties on the same subject. He had deflected them by asking them about themselves, a worn trick that none the less worked with most people (another thing he had learned from Father Lancing). Also, talking about Polly’s wedding had been a distraction: his mother had enjoyed the whole thing enormously, and his father had been impressed that Gerald had a title. It was odd: his father, who had once been such a terrifying and dominant force in his life, was now of no real account; that he was also a snob struck him as just one more pathetic aspect. But at least he, Christopher, could not be bullied any more. There had been small incidents at the lunch. His father had offered him a drink, and when he had refused, had pressed him, had tried to make him have one whether he liked it or not. It was when his mother had intervened – ‘Oh, Raymond, can’t you see he really doesn’t want one?’ – that he was taken back to those innumerable times in his childhood when she had tried to protect him and had often made things far worse. He had looked at her then with a sudden affection: money, and disappointment with her husband (painfully apparent) had aged her; she had the look of haggard brightness that he could now associate with inner discontent. He felt sorry for her as well.

  ‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you, darling?’ she was now saying again – she had said it several times during lunch.

  ‘I expect he’ll be back with us before you know where you are,’ his father said then. ‘Do you want a taxi?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll get a bus.’

  ‘What station are you going to? Because if it’s Victoria, we could give you a lift.’

  ‘It’s Marylebone, Mummy. I’m fine, really. Thank you very much for the splendid lunch. It was splendid,’ he repeated. He shook hands with his father, and put his arms around his mother’s bony shoulders. ‘Of course I’ll write to you. I’m not going to the ends of the earth, you know.’ He smiled and then kissed her as he saw her eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Darling! I do hope you will be happy. All right, at least?’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘Come on, now,’ his father said. He put his arm round her protectively. ‘I’m going to take you to a nice film to take your mind off it.’

  Everybody said goodbye again, and he turned and walked away down the street to the nearest bus stop. It was done.

  On the bus that eventually went down Baker Street, he could not help thinking of Polly whom he had loved so much. After that weekend in the caravan, he had suffered for her as much as about her: she, too, was enduring the pain of unrequited love. When Oliver fell ill and, in the end, in spite of all the vet could do and his nursing, had had to be put down, he had returned from the vet with the body which he had buried in the wood behind the caravan. It felt as though he had lost his only friend. He had held Oliver in his arms for the last moments of his life, feeling his poor body, his ribs like a toast-rack, his fur dull and staring, and then Oliver had looked up at him, his brandy-snap eyes still glowing with entire trust and devotion as the vet put the needle in. Seconds later he felt the body go slack. He had managed not to cry until he had got Oliver in the back of the car.

  The caravan seemed awful without Oli
ver. He mourned and withdrew from the Hursts who kept inviting him for meals.

  Then one day, Mrs Hurst – Marge – asked him whether he would take an old infirm neighbour to church in the car. ‘Tom takes him usually, but he’s got a terrible cold. I don’t want him going out.’

  So he did. He was a widower, a very old man with arthritis. All his movements were full of pain and he used crutches.

  ‘It’s good of you,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to miss my Sunday prayers.’

  As he was in the church, he thought he might as well try to pray. He prayed for Oliver, and afterwards he felt calmer and much better about him.

  That evening, he decided that he would take the plunge and ask Nora if he could be of any use in her establishment. Might as well try to be some use somewhere, had been what he had thought.

  Yes, she would be delighted if he would come. There was plenty to do. ‘I’m run off my feet,’ she had written. ‘You could be a great help.’

  It had not been at all what he had expected. He did not have to nurse people, Nora said, when she fetched him from the station, except for lifting them sometimes – her back had got quite bad doing it. ‘And there’s the garden,’ she added. ‘It would be wonderful if you could grow the vegetables. And you could talk to Richard sometimes. He gets rather bored because I’m so busy.’