Lydia sat with her knife and fork poised like Tower Bridge opening while Nan chopped up tomato and bacon. ‘If you give me kidney, I’ll spit it out,’ she had remarked earlier. A good deal of early-morning conversation with Nan consisted of threats from either side, but since neither called one another’s bluff it was difficult to know what the consequences might ever have been if either had gone through with them. As it was, Lydia knew perfectly well that Nan wouldn’t dream of cancelling the visit to Daniel Neal, and Nan knew that Lydia would not dream of spitting out kidney or anything else in front of Daddy. He, Daddy, had bent over her to kiss the top of her head as he did every morning and she smelled his lovely woody smell mixed with lavender water. Now he sat at the head of the table with a large plate of everything in front of him and the Telegraph propped against the marmalade dish. Kidneys were nothing to him. He slashed them and the horrible awful blood ran out and he mopped it up with fried bread. She drank some of her milk very noisily to make him look up. In winter he ate poor dead birds he had shot: partridges and pheasants with little black scrunched-up claws. He didn’t look up, but Nan seized her mug and put it out of reach. ‘Eat your breakfast,’ she said in the special quiet voice she used at mealtimes in the dining room.
Mummy came in. She smiled her lovely smile at Lydia, and came round the table to kiss her. She smelled of hay and some kind of flower that made Lydia feel like sneezing but not quite. She had lovely curly hair but with bits of white in it that were worrying because Lydia wanted her never to be dead which people with white hair could easily be.
Mummy said, ‘Where’s Louise?’, which was silly really, because you could still hear her practising.
Nan said, ‘I’ll tell her.’
‘Thank you, Nan. Perhaps the drawing-room clock has stopped.’
Mummy had Grape Nuts and coffee and toast for breakfast with her own little tiny pot of cream. She was opening her post which was letters that came through the front door and skidded over the polished floor in the hall. Lydia had had post once: on her last birthday when she was six. She had also ridden on an elephant, had tea in her milk and worn her first pair of lace-up outdoor shoes. She thought it had been the best day in her life, which was saying a lot, because she’d already lived through so many days. The piano-playing had stopped and Louise came in followed by Nan. She loved Louise who was terrifically old and wore stockings in winter.
Now Lou was saying, ‘You’re going out to lunch, Mummy, I can tell from your clothes.’
‘Yes, darling, but I’ll be back to see you before Daddy and I go out.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘We’re going to the theatre.’
‘What are you going to?’
‘A play called The Apple Cart. By George Bernard Shaw.’
‘Lucky you!’
Edward looked up from his paper. ‘Who are we going with?’
‘The Warings. We’re dining with them first; seven sharp. Black tie.’
‘Tell Phyllis to put my things out for me.’
‘I never go to the theatre.’
‘Louise! That’s not true. You always go at Christmas. And for your birthday treat.’
‘Treats don’t count. I mean I don’t go as a normal thing. If it’s going to be my career, I ought to go.’
Villy took no notice. She was looking at the front page of The Times. ‘Oh dear. Mollie Strangways’s mother has died.’
Lydia said, ‘How old was she?’
Villy looked up. ‘I don’t know, darling. I expect she was quite old.’
‘Was her hair gone quite white?’
Louise said, ‘How do they know which people who die to put in The Times? I bet far more people die in the world than would go on one page. How do they choose who to put?’
Her father said, ‘They don’t choose. People who want to put it in pay.’
‘If you were the King, would you have to pay?’
‘No – he’s different.’
Lydia, who had stopped eating, asked, ‘How old do people live?’ But she said it very quietly and nobody seemed to have heard her.
Villy, who had got up to pour herself more coffee, noticed Edward’s cup and refilled it now saying, ‘It’s Phyllis’s day off, so I’ll do your clothes. Try not to be back too late.’
‘How old do mothers live?’
Seeing her daughter’s face Villy said quickly, ‘For ages. Think of my mother – and Daddy’s. They’re awfully old and they’re both fine.’
‘Of course, you could always get murdered – that can happen at any age. Think of Tybalt. And the Princes in the Tower.’
‘What’s murdered? Louise, what’s murdered?’
‘Or drowned at sea. Shipwrecked,’ she added dreamily. She was longing to be shipwrecked.
‘Louise, do shut up. Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?’
But it was too late. Lydia had burst into gasping sobs. Villy picked her up and hugged her. Louise felt hot and sulky with shame.
‘There, my duck. You’ll see I’ll live to be terribly terribly old, and you’ll be quite grown up and have great big children like you who wear lace-up shoes—’
‘And riding jackets?’ She was still sobbing but she wanted a riding jacket – tweed, with a divided back and pockets to wear when she was riding her horses – and this seemed a good moment to get it.
‘We’ll see.’ She put Lydia back on the chair and Nan said, ‘Finish your milk.’ She was thirsty, so she did.
Edward, who had frowned at Louise, now said, ‘What about me? Don’t you want me to live for ever, too?’
‘Not so much. I do want you to.’
Louise said, ‘Well, I want you to. When you’re over eighty, I’ll wheel you about toothless and dribbling in a bath chair.’
This made her father roar with laughter as she had hoped and put her back into favour.
‘I shall look forward to every moment.’ He got to his feet and, carrying his paper, left the room.
Lydia said, ‘He’s gone to the lavatory. To do his big job.’
‘That’ll do,’ said Nanny sharply. ‘We don’t talk about things like that at mealtimes.’
Lydia stared at Louise; her eyes were expressionless, but her mouth made silent turkey gobbling movements. Louise, as she was meant to, started laughing.
‘Children, children,’ said Villy weakly. Lydia was killing sometimes, but Nanny’s amour propre must be considered.
‘Go upstairs, darling. Now – we’re going out soon.’
‘What time do you want us, madam?’
‘I should think about ten, Nanny.’
‘See my horses.’ Lydia had wriggled off her chair and rushed to the French windows, which Louise opened for her.
‘You come.’ She seized Louise’s hand.
Her horses were tied to the railings in the back garden. They were long sticks of different colours: a piece of plane tree was the piebald; a silvery stick was the grey; a piece of beech collected from Sussex was the bay. They all had elaborate halters made of bits of string, grass mowings in flower pots beside each one and their names in coloured chalk on pieces of cardboard. Lydia untied the grey and started cantering about the garden. Every now and then she gave a clumsy little jump and admonished her mount. ‘You mustn’t buck so much.’
‘Watch me riding,’ she called. ‘Lou! Watch me!’
But Louise, who was afraid of Nan’s displeasure and in any case had nearly an hour before Miss Milliment arrived and wanted to finish Persuasion, simply said, ‘I have. I did watch you,’ and went – as bad as a grown-up.
Edward, having kissed Villy in the hall, been handed his grey Homburg by Phyllis – at other times of the year she always helped him into his overcoat – picked up his copy of the Timber Trades Journal and let himself out. In front of the house the Buick, black and gleaming, awaited him. There was the usual glimpse of Bracken filling the driver’s seat, immobile as a waxwork, before, reacting to Edward’s appearance as though he had been shot, he leapt
from the car and was looming over the back door which he opened for Edward.
‘Morning, Bracken.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘The wharf.’
‘Very good, sir.’
After this exchange – the same every morning, unless Edward wanted to go anywhere else – no more was said. Edward settled himself comfortably and began idly turning the pages of his journal, but he was not reading it, he was reviewing his day. A couple of hours in the office, dealing with mail, then he’d have a look and see how the samples of veneer from the elm they had bought from the piles of the old Waterloo Bridge were getting on. The wood had been drying for a year now, but they had started cutting last week, and now, at last, they would discover whether the Old Man’s hunch about it had been right or a disaster. It was exciting. Then he’d got a lunch at his club with a couple of blokes from the Great Western Railway which would, he was pretty sure, result in a substantial order for mahogany. A directors’ meeting in the afternoon, the Old Man, and his brother – sign his letters – and then there might be time to have a cup of tea with Denise Ramsay, who had the twin advantages of a husband frequently abroad on business and no children. But like all advantages, this cut both ways; she was a little too free and was therefore a little too much in love with him; after all, it was never meant to be a serious Thing – as she called it. There might not turn out to be time to see her since he had to get back to change for the theatre.
If anyone had ever asked him if he was in love with his wife, Edward would have said of course he was. He would not have added that, in spite of eighteen years of relative happiness and comfort and three splendid children, Villy did not really like the bed side of life. This was quite common in wives – one poor fellow at the club, Martyn Slocombe-Jones, had once confided to him late at night after a game of billiards and rather a lot of excellent port that his wife hated it so much that she’d only let him do it when she wanted a baby. She was a damned attractive woman, too, and a wonderful wife, as Martyn had said. In other ways. They had five children, and Martyn didn’t think she was going to wear a sixth. Rotten for him. When Edward had suggested that he find consolation elsewhere, Martyn had simply gazed at him with mournful brown eyes and said, ‘But I’m in love with her, old boy, always have been. Never looked at anyone else. You know how it is.’ And Edward, who didn’t, said of course he did. That conversation had warned him off Marcia Slocombe-Jones anyhow. It didn’t matter, because although he could have gone for her there were so many other girls to go for. How lucky he was! To have come back from France not only alive, but relatively unscathed! In winter, his chest played him up a bit due to living in trenches where the gas had hung about for weeks, but otherwise … Since then he’d come back, gone straight into the family firm, met Villy at a party, married her as soon as her contract with the ballet company she was with expired and as soon as she’d agreed to the Old Man’s dictate that her career should stop from then on. ‘Can’t marry a gal whose head’s full of something else. If marriage isn’t the woman’s career, it won’t be a good marriage.’
His attitude was thoroughly Victorian, of course, but all the same, there was quite a lot to be said for it. Whenever Edward looked at his own mother, which he did infrequently but with great affection, he saw her as the perfect reflection of his father’s attitude: a woman who had serenely fulfilled all her family responsibilities and at the same time retained her youthful enthusiasms – for her garden that she adored and for music. At over seventy, she was quite capable of playing double concertos with professionals. Unable to discriminate between the darker, more intricate veins of temperament that distinguish one person from another, he could not really see why Villy should not be as happy and fulfilled as the Duchy. (His mother’s Victorian reputation for plain living – nothing rich in food and no frills or pretensions about her own appearance or her household’s had long ago earned her the nickname of Duchess – shortened by her own children to Duch, and lengthened by her grandchildren to Duchy.) Well, he had never prevented Villy from having interests: her charities, her riding and skiing, her crazes for learning the most various musical instruments, her handicrafts – spinning, weaving and so on – and when he thought of his brothers’ wives – Sybil was too highbrow for him and Zoë too demanding – he felt that he had not done too badly …
Louise’s cousin, Polly Cazalet, arrived half an hour early for lessons because she and Louise had been making face cream out of white of egg, chopped parsley, witch hazel and a drop of cochineal to make it pinkish. It was called Wonder Cream and Polly had made beautiful labels which were to be stuck onto the various jars they had collected from their mothers. The cream was in a pudding basin in the garden shed. They were planning to sell it to the aunts and cousins and to Phyllis at a lower price because they knew she hadn’t got much money. The jars had to be different prices anyway as they were mostly different sizes and shapes. They had been washed by Louise and were also in the garden shed. It was all kept there because Louise had stolen six eggs from the larder as well as the egg whisk when Emily was out shopping. They had given some of the yolks to Louise’s tortoise, who had not liked them very much, even when mixed with dandelions (his favourite food) from Polly’s garden.
‘It’s looks funny to me.’
They looked at it again – willing it to be nicer.
‘I don’t think the cochineal was a very good idea – it was a bit green.’
‘Cochineal makes things pink, you fool.’
Polly blushed. ‘I know,’ she lied. ‘The trouble is, it’s gone all runny.’
‘That won’t stop it being good for the skin. Anyway, it’ll go stiffer in time.’ Polly put the spoon she had brought for potting into the mixture. ‘The green isn’t the parsley; it’s got a sort of crust on it.’
‘You get that.’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course. Think of Devonshire cream.’
‘Do you think we should just try it on our faces before we sell it?’
‘Stop fussing. You stick on the labels and I’ll pot. The labels are awfully good,’ she added and Polly blushed again. The labels said ‘Wonder Cream’ and underneath, ‘Apply generously at night. You will be astonished at the change in your appearance.’ Some of the jars were too small for them.
Miss Milliment arrived before they had finished. They pretended not to hear the bell, but Phyllis came out to tell them.
‘No good selling her any,’ Louise muttered.
‘I thought you said—’
‘I don’t mean her. I mean Miss M.’
‘Lord, no. Coals to Newcastle.’ Polly often got things wrong.
‘Coals to Newcastle would mean Miss M was as beautiful as the day.’ This made them both double up laughing.
Miss Milliment, a kind and exceedingly intelligent woman, had a face, as Louise had once remarked, like a huge old toad. When her mother had reprimanded her for being unkind, Louise had retorted that she liked toads, but she had known that this was a dishonest reply because a face that was perfectly acceptable for a toad was not actually much good on a person. After that, Miss Milliment’s – certainly astonishing – appearance was only discussed in private with Polly and between them they had invented a life of unrelieved tragedy, or rather lives, since they did not agree upon Miss Milliment’s probable misfortunes. An undisputed fact about her was her antiquity: she had been Villy’s governess who had admitted that she had seemed old then and, goodness knows, that was ages ago. She said ‘chymist’ and of course ‘chymistry’ and once told Louise that she had picked wild roses in the Cromwell Road when young. She smelled of stale hot old clothes especially noticeable when they kissed her, which Louise, as a kind of penance, had made herself do ever since the toad remark. She lived in Stoke Newington and came five mornings a week to teach them for three hours and on Fridays she stayed to lunch. Today she was wearing her bottle-green lock-knit jersey suit and a small, bottle-green straw hat with petersham ribbon, which sat just above her very
tight, greasy bun of grey hair. They began the morning, as they always did, by reading Shakespeare aloud for an hour and a half.
Today was the last two acts of Othello and Louise was reading him. Polly, who preferred the women’s parts – not seeming to realise that they weren’t the best – was Desdemona, and Miss Milliment was Iago and Emilia and everybody else. Louise, who secretly read ahead of the lessons, had learned Othello’s last speech by heart, which was just as well because the moment she got to
… I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice
tears rushed to her eyes and she would not have been able to read. At the end, Polly said, ‘Are people like that?’
‘Like what, Polly?’
‘Like Iago, Miss Milliment.’
‘I don’t suppose there are very many of them. Of course, there may be more than we know, because each Iago has to find an Othello for his wickedness.’
‘Like Mrs Simpson and King Edward?’
‘Of course not. Polly, you are stupid! The King was in love with Mrs Simpson – it’s completely different. He gave everything up for her and he could have given her up for everything.’
Polly, blushing, muttered, ‘Mr Baldwin could be Iago, he could be.’
Miss Milliment, in her oil-on-the-waters voice, said, ‘We cannot really compare the two situations, although it was certainly an interesting idea of yours, Polly, to try. Now I think we had better do our geography. I am looking forward to your map you were going to draw for me. Will you fetch the atlas, Louise?’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 2