‘I think that is rather you.’
‘It is lovely. It’s just that I’ve never worn this colour.’
Villy was arrayed in one of Hermione’s bargains: a dress of lime green chiffon, the bodice cut in a low V edged with gold beads and a little pleated cape that floated from the beaded shoulder straps. The skirt was simply cut in cunning gores that lay flat on her slim hips and flared out to a tremendous floating skirt.
‘I think you look divine in it. Let’s ask Miss MacDonald what she thinks.’
Miss MacDonald instantly materialised. She was a lady of indeterminate age – always dressed in a grey pinstriped flannel skirt and a tussore silk blouse. She was devoted to Hermione, and ran the shop for her during Hermione’s frequent absences. Hermione led a mysterious life composed of parties, weekends, hunting in winter and doing up various amusing flats she bought in Mayfair and let at exorbitant rents to people she met at parties. Everybody was in love with her: her reputation rested upon the broad front of universal adulation. Whoever the current lover might be was lost in a crowd of apparently desperate, apparently hopeless suitors. She was not beautiful, but invariably glamorous and groomed and her drawl concealed a first-class brain and a reckless courage in the hunting field or indeed anywhere else that it was required of her. Edward’s brother Hugh had been in love with her during the war – was reputed to have been one of the twenty-one men who had proposed to her during that period – but she had married Knebworth and, shortly after the birth of her son, had divorced him. She was good with men’s wives, but genuinely fond of Villy for whom she always made special knockdown prices.
Villy, standing in a kind of trance in the diaphanous frock that seemed to have turned her into some fragile, exotic stranger, realised that Miss MacDonald was registering appreciation.
‘Might have been made for you, Mrs Cazalet.’
‘The midnight blue would be more useful.’
‘Oh, Lady Knebworth! What about the café-au-lait lace?’
‘That’s brilliant of you, Miss MacDonald. Do fetch it.’ The moment that Villy saw the coffee lace she knew that she wanted it. She wanted all of them, and them included a wine-coloured moiré with huge puff sleeves made of ribbon rosettes that she had tried on earlier.
‘It’s utter agony, isn’t it?’ Hermione had already decided that Villy, who had come in for two frocks, should buy three of them, and knowing Villy, it was essential that she should forgo one. Stage whispers ensued.
‘How much are they?’
‘Miss MacDonald, how much?’
‘The moiré is twenty, the chiffon is fifteen, the lace and the midnight blue crêpe could be sixteen each. Isn’t that right, Lady Knebworth?’
There was a brief silence while Villy tried and failed to add things up. ‘I can’t have four, anyway. It’s out of the question.’
‘I think,’ said Hermione consideredly, ‘that the blue is a bit on the obvious side for you, but the others are all perfect. Supposing we made the moiré and the lace fifteen each, and threw in the chiffon for ten? How much does that come to, Miss MacDonald?’ (She knew perfectly well, but she also knew that Villy was bad at sums.)
‘That comes to forty, Lady Knebworth.’
And before she knew it, Villy had said, ‘I’ll take them. It’s wicked of me, but I can’t resist it. They’re all so ravishing. Goodness, I don’t know what Edward will say.’
‘He’ll adore you in them. Have them packed, Miss MacDonald, I’m sure Mrs Cazalet will want to take them with her.’
‘I shall wear one tonight. Thank you so much, Hermione.’
In the taxi going to Mummy, she thought, I’m really ashamed of myself. I never used to buy a dress for more than five pounds. But they’ll last for ever and I’m sick of wearing the same things. We do go out a lot, she added almost as though she was arguing with someone else, and I was fearfully good about the January sales. I only bought linen for the house. And I only bought Lydia things that she needed – except the riding jacket, and she wanted that so much. Shopping with Lydia had been a tearful business. She hated having her feet X-rayed in new shoes.
‘I don’t want nasty green feet!’ and then she wept because Nan said she wasn’t old enough for a riding jacket, and then she wept because Nan wouldn’t let her wear it home on the bus. They had bought Chilprufe vests for next winter, two pairs of shoes, a pleated navy serge skirt on a liberty bodice and a dear little jacket made of velveteen to go with it. A linen hat for summer and four pairs of white cotton socks had completed their purchases. Lydia only really wanted the jacket. She wanted stockings like Lou instead of socks which were babyish, and she wanted a scarlet velvet jacket instead of the navy blue one. She did not like her indoor shoes because they had a strap and a button instead of laces. Villy felt that she deserved a treat after all that. There was still Louise to do, and Teddy when he got back from school, although he wouldn’t need much. She looked at the three wonderful dress boxes that contained her booty and started trying to decide which she would wear for the theatre.
As it was such a fine day, Miss Milliment walked to Notting Hill Gate to have her lunch in the ABC. She had a tomato sandwich and a cup of tea, and then, because she still felt hungry, a custard tart. So lunch cost nearly a shilling which was more than she knew she should spend. She read The Times during her lunch, saving the crossword for the long train journey home. Her landlady provided her with an adequate evening meal and toast and tea for breakfast. She sometimes wished that she could afford a wireless for the evenings, because her eyes did not stand up to all the reading she found herself having recourse to. Since her father – a retired clergyman – had died she had always lived in digs, as she put it. On the whole she did not mind very much, she had never been the domestic type. Years ago the man she had thought she was going to marry had died in the Boer War and her grief had eventually tempered into a humble acceptance that she would not have made a very comfortable home for him. Now, she taught; a godsend it had been when Viola had written and asked her to teach Louise and subsequently her cousin Polly. Until that happened she had begun to feel quite desperate: the money her father had left her just provided a roof over her head, but nothing else at all, and she had ended by not having the fare to get to the National Gallery, not to speak of those exhibitions that one had to pay to get into. Pictures were her passion – particularly the French Impressionists, and of them, Cézanne was her god. She sometimes reflected with a tinge of irony that it was odd that so many people had described her as ‘no oil painting’. She was, in fact, one of the ugliest people she had ever seen in her life, but once she was sure of this she ignored her appearance. She clothed herself by covering her body with whatever came to hand cheapest and most easily; she bathed once a week (the landlady charged extra for baths) and she had taken over her father’s steel-rimmed spectacle frames that served her very well. Laundry was either difficult or expensive so her clothes were not very clean. In the evenings she read philosophy and poetry and books about the history of art, and at weekends she looked at pictures. Looked! She stared, stayed, revisited a picture until it was absorbed into those secret parts of her bulky being that made memory, which then digested into spiritual nourishment. Truth – the beauty of it, the way that it could sometimes transcend the ordinary appearance of things – moved and excited her; inside, she was a paradise of appreciation. The five pounds a week that she earned from teaching the two girls enabled her to see all that she had time to see and save a little against the years when Louise and Polly would no longer require her. At seventy-three she would be unlikely to get another job. She was lonely, and entirely used to it. She left tuppence for the waitress and, trotting lightly, zigzagged her shortsighted way to the Tube.
Phyllis began her half day by going to Ponting’s. There was a summer sale on and she needed stockings. She also enjoyed a good look round although she knew this would mean that she would be sorely tempted to buy something – a blouse, or a summer dress that she did not need. She walked over
Campden Hill to Kensington High Street to save the fare. She was a country girl and the walk was nothing to her. She wore her summer coat (pale grey slub) and skirt, the blouse Mrs Cazalet had given her for Christmas, and a straw hat that she had had for ages and retrimmed from time to time. She had grey cotton gloves and her handbag. Phyllis earned thirty-eight pounds a year and she sent her mother ten shillings a month. She had been engaged for four years now to the under-gardener on the estate where her father had been gamekeeper until his arthritis forced his retirement. Being engaged to Ted had become part of the landscape of her life: it was no longer exciting – never had been, really, because they had known from the start that they would not be able to afford to marry for a very long time. Anyway, she had known him all her life. She had gone into service and come to London; they met about four times a year – on her fortnight’s holiday when she went home, and on the few occasions when she could persuade Ted to come to London for the day. Ted hated London, but he was a good, steady chap and he agreed to come sometimes – mostly in summer, because the rest of the year, what with the weather and everything, there was nowhere for them to go. They sat in tea shops and went to the cinema, and that was the best time because, if she encouraged him, he would put his arm round her, she could hear him breathing and he never knew what the film had been about. Once a year she brought him back to tea at Lansdowne Road and they sat in the kitchen with Emily and Edna plying him with food and although he cleared his throat a lot he became speechless and let his tea get cold. Anyway, she saved ten bob a month towards getting married and that left her with two pounds three and threepence for her days off and her clothes and everything she needed so she had to be careful. But she’d got the best part of thirty pounds in the Post Office. It was nice to have the future certain and she had always wanted to see a bit of life before she settled down. She would have a good look round Ponting’s, and then she’d go for a walk in Kensington Gardens and find a nice bench to sit on in the sun. She liked watching the ducks and the toy boats on the Round Pond and then she’d have tea in Lyons and end up going to the Coronet or the Embassy in Notting Hill Gate, whichever one had the film with Norma Shearer in it. She liked Norma Shearer because Ted had once said she looked a bit like her.
Ponting’s had the stockings on sale. Three pairs for four bob. It was ever so full of people. She looked longingly at the racks of summer dresses reduced to three bob. There was one with buttercups on it and a Peter Pan collar that would have been just right for her – she knew it – but she had the bright idea of popping into Barker’s to see if she could pick up a remnant so she could make herself one. She was lucky. She found a pretty green voile with a trellis pattern of roses on it – three and a quarter yards for half a crown. A bargain! Edna, who was clever at dress-making, had patterns, so she needn’t buy one of them. Sixpence saved, which was better than sixpence spent, as her mother would say. By the time she got to the Round Pond she felt very tired and it must have been the sun that made her sleepy because she dropped off and then she had to ask a gentleman the time and there was a whole crowd of dirty, ragged children, some of them barefooted, with a baby in a battered old perambulator in front of her by the edge of the pond. They were fishing for sticklebacks which they put into a jam jar and after the gentleman had moved on one of them said, ‘I wonder if I could trouble you for the toime?’ and they shrieked with laughter and started chanting it, except the baby who had a dummy in its mouth. ‘That’s very rude,’ she said as she felt herself going red. But they took no notice because they were common. Her mother would never have let her go out like that.
She had a bit of a headache and for a moment of panic thought she might have her monthly coming on. It would be four days early if she was, but if she was, she’d have to go straight home since she hadn’t got anything with her. But walking back through the gardens to Bayswater Road, she reflected that no, she couldn’t have. ’Cos if she was, her spots would be much worse, and she still only had the one. Phyllis was nearly twenty-four; she’d been in service for just over ten years. When she’d ‘started’ – in her first place, she’d gone crying to the head housemaid about the blood – Amy had simply shown her how to fold the strips of flannel and said everybody got it and it happened once a month. That was the only time anyone had ever mentioned it to her, except when Mrs Cazalet had shown her where the flannel was kept in the linen cupboard. But she didn’t say anything, which, being a lady, Phyllis would have expected, and although she and Edna knew when each other had it, they never mentioned it either, because, being in service, they knew how ladies behaved. It seemed a funny thing to get, but if it happened to everyone, it must be all right. The flannel was put in a linen bag and sent to the laundry every week – ‘sanitary napkins’ they were called on the list. Naturally the servants had a separate bag. Anyway, she was all right, and she had two cups of tea and a fruit bun and by the time she got to the Coronet, she felt much better.
Polly had stayed to lunch with Louise after lessons. There were Nan and Lydia as well. Lunch was dark brown mince and thick white spaghetti. Lydia called it worms and got smacked because their mother wasn’t there, but she didn’t cry much because she had spread her riding jacket out on Louise’s leather reading chair to look at while she was eating. Louise talked about Othello nearly all the time, but Polly, who worried about other people’s feelings and could see that Othello didn’t interest Nan all that much, asked her what she was knitting and where she was going to spend her holiday. Nan was making a pink bedjacket for her mother and was off to Woburn Sands for her holiday in a fortnight’s time. One of the worst features of even this amount of conversation with Nan was that Louise would accuse her afterwards of sucking up and it wasn’t at all that: she could quite see why not everybody would be interested in Othello.
Lydia said, ‘Nan’s mother has bad legs. She has to keep them up all the time in case they drop off. They’re unusually bad,’ she added after thinking about it.
‘That’ll do, Lydia. We don’t talk about people’s legs at mealtimes.’
Which just makes us all think about them, Polly thought. For pudding there was gooseberry fool, which Polly didn’t like but didn’t dare to say so. Lydia had no such compunction.
‘It smells of sick,’ she said, ‘greeny, hurried sick.’ Nan picked her off her chair and carried her out of the room.
‘Strewth!’ said Louise, who was given to what she thought of as Shakespearean oaths. ‘Poor old Lydia. She’ll be for it now.’ And indeed they could hear muffled wails from above.
‘I don’t want any.’
‘I’m not surprised, I don’t like it much, either. We’d better finish off the Wonder Cream. You did suck up to Nan.’
‘I didn’t, honestly.’
When they had finished potting and labelling the cream they took it up to Louise’s room. Then they lay on the lawn in the back garden until the Walls’ man came round with his tricycle and cabinet of ices. They each had a lime Snofrute and lay on the lawn again and talked about the holidays and what they would do when they were grown up.
‘Mummy wants me to be Presented.’
‘What – be a deb?’ Louise could hardly contain her contempt. ‘Surely you want a proper career?’
‘What could I be?’
‘You’re pretty good at painting. You could be a painter.’
‘I could be Presented and then be a painter.’
‘It doesn’t work like that, Polly – honestly. You’d go to all those dances with stupid people proposing to you all the time and you’d agree to marry one of them out of sheer kindness. You know how bad you are at saying no.’
‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love.’
‘Even that’s not enough sometimes.’ She was thinking darkly of John Gielgud and her endless dreams of saving his life in ways so spectacular and brave that he would have to marry her. They would live in a mansion flat (the height of sophistication – she only knew one family who lived in a flat) and play opposite one anothe
r in all the plays and have lobster and coffee ices for supper.
‘Poor Lou! You’ll get over it!’
Louise smiled her special sad, heroically vulnerable smile that she had practised in front of the bathroom mirror. ‘I shan’t. It isn’t the kind of thing you get over.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Actually,’ Louise said, ‘I sometimes rather enjoy it. You know – imagining what it would be like. And I don’t think about it all the time.’ This, she knew was partial honesty: sometimes she didn’t think about it for days on end. I’m the kind of dishonest person who can’t bear to be completely dishonest, she thought.
She looked at Polly, who was lying on her back with her eyes shut against the sun. Although Polly was twelvish, a year younger, she did not seem it. Polly was utterly direct, without guile. Tactless, it often got called: if you asked her what she thought, she told you – if she knew what she thought, but her honesty caused her much indecision and sometimes pain. She would look at you with her rather small dark blue eyes if you asked her things like could she bear to go in a submarine, or shoot their pony if its leg was broken, or die for her country without spilling any beans if she was a spy and got caught, and you would see her milky-white forehead furrowed by little glancing frowns as she went on staring at you while she struggled for truth – often failing. ‘I don’t know,’ she would frequently say. ‘I wish I did, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure, like you.’ But Louise secretly knew perfectly well that she simply made decisions according to her mood, and that Polly’s indecision was somehow more serious. This irritated her, but she respected Polly. Polly never acted, never played to the gallery as Nan said, and could not see the beach for the pebbles. And she was incapable of telling any kind of lie. Louise did not exactly tell lies – known to be a serious crime in the Cazalet family – but she spent a great deal of her time being other people who naturally thought and saw things differently from Louise so what she said at those times did not count. Being an actress required this kind of flexibility, and although Polly sometimes teased her about her variable reactions and she teased Polly back about being so serious and not knowing things, that was where the teasing stopped. Their worst, their most real, fears were sacrosanct: Louise suffered from appalling homesickness (could not stay anywhere except with the family – dreaded being sent to a boarding school) and Polly was terrified that there might be another war when they would all be gassed to death and particularly her cat Pompey who, being a cat, was not likely to be issued with a gas mask. Polly was an authority about this. Her father had a good many books about the war; he had been in it, had emerged with one hand gone, over a hundred pieces of shrapnel in his body that they couldn’t get out and he got frightful headaches – the worst in the world, her mother said. And all the people in the photograph on his dressing table – all soldiers in yellowy baggy uniform – were dead, except for him. Polly read all his books and asked him little casual trapping questions that simply proved to her that what she read – the slaughter, the miles of mud and barbed wire, the shells and tanks and, above all, the awful poison gas that Uncle Edward had somehow managed to live through – was all of it true, a true and continuing nightmare that had lasted over four years. If there was another war it could only be worse, because people kept saying how warships and aeroplanes and guns and everything that could make it worse had been improved by scientific development. The next war would be twice as frightful and go on for twice as long. Very secretly indeed, she envied Louise for only being afraid of boarding school; after all, she was already fourteen – in another two or three years she’d be too old to go to one. But nobody was too old or too young for war.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 3