Sybil, who up until then had been listening affectionately to the Brig’s extremely long story about the second time he went to Burma, said, ‘But he’s also built some pretty good roads, hasn’t he? Had them built, I mean?’
‘Of course he has,’ said Edward. ‘Generated employment, got people to work. And, my God, I bet they work harder than they do here! I sometimes think that this country could do with a dictator. Look at Germany! Look at Hitler! Look what he’s done for his people!’
Hugh was shocked. ‘We don’t want a dictator, Ed! You can’t think that!’
‘Of course we don’t! What we need is a decent socialist government. Someone who understands the working classes. They’d work if they had a decent incentive.’ Rupert looked defiantly round the room at his Tory family. ‘This lot think of nothing but preserving the status quo.’
The chocolate soufflé arrived and deflected them from this well-worn jungle path, although Zoë could hear Edward mutter that there was nothing much wrong with the status quo that he could see.
After the soufflé, Sybil and Villy said they were going to bottle the children up for the night, and Zoë, who did not want them to see how little Clary liked her, sat tight. Rachel, who had observed this, said she was going to fetch her cigarettes. The Duchy suggested that they leave the men to their cheese and port.
Louise and Polly had had their bath together and left the water for Clary as they had been told to do, but she didn’t seem to be about, and they didn’t see why they should find her. They brushed their hair and plaited Louise’s, which was difficult because it wasn’t long enough yet for a good plait. She had decided to grow it, so that when she was an actress she wouldn’t have to wear wigs. ‘Although if you act someone very old, you’ll have to have a white one,’ Polly said, but Louise said the only old person she wanted to play, and it was play not act, was Lear and they weren’t yet fair about letting women play the decent Shakespeare parts.
‘I’ll probably have to start with Hamlet,’ she said.
‘I can’t see why you couldn’t just be Rosalind – or Viola. They both wear men’s clothes.’
‘But underneath they’re women. That’s the point. I’ll put the elastic band on – other people always tweak.’
‘You know, Polly, you really ought to think what you’re going to do – you’re getting a bit old not to know.’
‘I know I am. I think I’d quite like to marry someone,’ she said some minutes later.
‘That’s feeble! All kinds of people get married! That’s neither here nor there!’
‘I knew you’d say that.’ Any minute now Louise would start making awful suggestions. She’d done it so often that Polly thought she must have run out of ideas by now, but she never had.
‘A fishmonger? You could wear a long apron and a nice little straw hat.’
‘I’d hate it. It’s so surprising and awful when blood comes out of fish.’
‘You’d be good at arranging them on the slab.’
‘If only they weren’t fish, I would.’
‘It’s not good being squeamish, Polly. There’s hardly anything you can be if you’re that. I shall have to stab people, and strangle them, and faint down flights of stairs.’
‘If you’re going to be like that, I shall read.’
‘All right, I won’t. Let’s go and find Teddy and Simon and play Monopoly.’
But in the schoolroom they found Teddy and Simon in the middle of a game which looked like going on for ages.
‘We’ll play the next one with you,’ one of them said, but it was an idle promise because the chances were that they’d be made to go to bed long before it finished.
‘You can stay here if you shut up,’ the other one said, so, of course, they took their supper trays and went back to their room. Louise tried to slam the door and spilt a lot of her milk.
‘If only Pompey was here! He loves spilt milk, much more than in a saucer.’ They got a face towel and mopped it up, and Polly kindly offered to go and ask for some more.
‘Please ask for it in a mug. I simply loathe milk in a glass – it makes the milk seem all watery.’
After supper they got into their beds and Polly did her knitting that she’d been making since the Christmas holidays, a thick, very pale pink jumper, and Louise started The Wide, Wide World and was soon snuffling and wiping her eyes on the sheet. ‘Everything to do with God seems very sad,’ she said. Polly stopped her knitting – at least she’d done nearly an inch – and read The Brown Fairy Book because it was not much fun not reading when the other person was. She put on a light and moths came in, little flittery ones and fat ones that thudded against the lampshade.
When Villy and Sybil came, they at once asked where Clary was.
Polly said, ‘Don’t know.’
Louise said, ‘We’d clean forgotten her,’ but they both knew there would be trouble. After some questioning they went in search of her. Then Aunt Rachel came in and asked the same thing.
‘We don’t know, Aunt Rach, honestly. She didn’t come to the schoolroom for supper. We left the bath for her.’ Louise tried to make that sound kind, but it didn’t because it wasn’t. Aunt Rachel went out of the room at once, and they could hear her talking to their mothers. They looked at each other.
‘It’s not our fault.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Polly. ‘We didn’t want her to come with us after tea.’
‘Blast! The trouble is she makes me feel so awful and that makes me not like her. Much.’
After a pause, Polly said, ‘She doesn’t make you feel awful – it’s how we are to her that does. We’ll have to—’ but then Aunt Villy came in and she shut up.
‘Now listen, you two. You must not gang up on Clary. How would you like it if she and the other one of you did it to either of you?’
‘We honestly didn’t gang up,’ Louise began, but Polly said, ‘We promise we won’t any more.’
But Aunt Villy took no notice of this and said, ‘I blame you, Louise, most, because you are the oldest.’ She was turning down Clary’s bed, and then opening her rather battered suitcase. ‘You could at least have helped her unpack.’
‘Polly is the same age as Clary, and I don’t help her unpack.’
Aunt Sybil came in now, and said, ‘She’s nowhere to be found. Rachel is asking in the kitchen, but I think we ought to get Rupert.’
‘Shall we go and look for her, Aunt Syb?’
But her mother said at once, ‘You will do no such thing. You will unpack her suitcase really nicely, and one of you may fetch her supper from the schoolroom. I am very displeased with you, Louise.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.’ Louise rushed to the suitcase and began taking Clary’s clothes out.
Polly got out of bed to go and fetch the tray. She sensed that her mother was not so cross as Aunt Villy was with Louise, whom she knew was by now really upset. Then she realised that her mother realised this too. Their eyes met before Sybil said, ‘Have you any idea where she might be?’
Polly thought as hard as she could, but she wasn’t Clary, so how could she think? She shook her head. The mothers went away and Louise cried.
In the end, after Rupert had been told, and the uncles joined in the search, and even Zoë had walked about the tennis court, calling for her, and people had been to the stables, and the gardener’s cottage, and the greenhouses and even into the wood, it was Rachel who found her. She had slipped up to her room to get a coat and join the outside search and there was Clary asleep on the floor. She had made herself a little bed of armchair cushions, and Rachel’s coat was over her. She was fast asleep with her sandshoes beside her. On Rachel’s pillow was a note. ‘Dear Aunt Rach, I’d rather sleep in your room. I hope you don’t mind. I only didn’t undress because of getting cold. Love from Clary.’ Rupert said he’d wake her up and talk to her and then take her to her room, but Rachel said much better to leave her where she was and got her a blanket and a proper pillow.
So coffee was dru
nk very late that first evening, and then the Duchy and Villy played duets for a bit, which Zoë found awfully boring because it meant that you couldn’t talk. Sybil went to bed first, and Hugh said he’d go with her.
‘What was that all about, do you think?’
‘Well, Louise and Polly are great friends. They see each other nearly every day in London. I expect Clary felt left out.’
‘Here – I’ll do that for you.’ He took her hairpins out and laid them one by one on the palm of the hand she held out to him. ‘You’re too tired,’ he accused, so tenderly that her eyes pricked.
‘Too tired to hold my arms above my head. Thank you, my darling.’
‘I’ll undress you.’
She stood up and pulled the smock dress over her head.
‘Villy made too much of it with Louise. She always does.’
‘Well, that’s not our business.’ He unhooked her brassiere and eased the shoulder straps down her arms. She stepped out of her knickers and kicked off her sandals standing before him, naked, grotesque and beautiful. ‘Where’s your nightie?’
‘On the bed, I think. Darling. You must be sick of me looking like this.’
‘I marvel at it.’ Then he added more lightly, ‘I feel privileged to behold you. Go to bed.’
‘It can’t be that easy for Rupert.’
‘Don’t you worry about him.’
She heaved herself into bed.
‘I wish you weren’t going back on Monday.’
‘I’m sure I could swap with Edward if you wanted me to.’
‘No – no, I don’t. I’d rather have you in London when it’s born.’
He went to the curtains and drew them apart. The light woke him in the morning, but he knew – or thought he knew – that she liked them open.
‘You don’t have to draw them. I really don’t mind.’
‘I like them open,’ he lied. ‘You know I do.’
‘Of course.’ It was no good her wanting them shut when she knew he liked air. The light did wake her in the mornings, but it was a small price to pay for someone she loved so much.
‘… and I honestly think that if only Zoë made the slightest attempt to pull her weight as a stepmother, poor little Clary would be a much easier child.’
‘She’s awfully young, you know. I expect she finds the family en masse a bit overwhelming. I like her,’ he added.
‘I know you do.’ Villy unscrewed her earrings and put them back into their battered little box.
‘Well, it’s good that someone likes her – apart from Rupert, of course.’
‘I don’t think he likes her. He’s mad about her, but that’s not the same thing at all.’
‘That’s all too subtle for me, I’m afraid.’ He spoke indistinctly, because he’d taken out his plate to clean it.
‘Darling, you know perfectly well what I mean. She’s full of SA.’ Villy mentioned this in a facetious tone that did not conceal her disgust.
Edward, who was very well aware of Zoë’s sex appeal but sensed that this was dangerous ground, changed the subject to Teddy and listened amiably while Villy said how worried she was about his eyes, and did Edward think he was leaving his prep school too young, and hadn’t he grown in the last term unbelievably? In fact, she went on chattering after they were in bed and he wanted her to stop.
‘First night of the holidays,’ he said, kissing her, and feeling with one hand for the short, soft curly hair at the back of her neck.
Villy strained away from him for a moment, but she was only turning off the light.
‘… I do try but she simply doesn’t like me!’
‘I think she feels that you don’t like her.’
‘Anyway, it’s Ellen’s job to know where she is. I mean – surely she’s not meant to just look after Neville? She’s meant to be the children’s nurse, isn’t she?’
‘Clary is twelve, a bit too old for a nanny. Still, I agree with you, she should have seen that Clary went to bed.’
Zoë didn’t reply. She felt she had shifted the balance of blame, felt consequently less guilty – able to be softer.
Rupert was cleaning his teeth and spitting into the slop pail. He said, ‘I’ll have a talk with Ellen tomorrow. And Clary, too, of course.’
‘All right, darling.’ It sounded, irritatingly, like a concession (about what?). I don’t want to row about it, he reminded himself. He glanced at her to see how she was getting on with the interminable business of cleaning her face. She was using the transparent stuff from a bottle; it was nearly over. She caught his eye in the dressing-table glass and began one of her slow confiding smiles; he watched the beguiling dimple below her right cheekbone appear, and went over to her, pulling the kimono off her shoulders. Her skin was cool as alabaster, as lustrous as pearls, the warm white of a rose. He thought, but did not say these things; his deepest adoration of her could not be shared; somewhere he knew that her image and herself were not the same, and he could only cling to the image through secrecy.
‘It’s high time I took you to bed,’ he said.
‘All right, darling.’
When he had made love to her, and she had turned, with a sigh of content, onto her side, she said, ‘I will try harder with Clary, I truly promise you I will.’
He remembered, irresistibly, the last time she had said that and answered as he had before, ‘I know that you will.’
My darling, I wonder if you will ever know how much you are that? I don’t know how long this will be, because I am writing this in the common room, where, as you know, everybody resting between bouts of teaching comes for a fag and a cup of coffee, and, unfortunately, a chat. So I get interrupted, and in twelve minutes’ time Jenkins Minor will loom to murder a perfectly harmless little piece of Bach. Last Wednesday was lovely, wasn’t it? I sometimes think, or perhaps I have to think, that we get more out of our precious times together than people who do not have our difficulties, who can meet and be affectionate openly and when they please. But oh! How I miss you! You are the most rare, miraculous creature – a much better person than I in every imaginable way. Sometimes I wish you were not so entirely good – so unselfish, so generous and untiring in your attention and kindness to all. I am greedy; I want you to myself. It’s all right; I know that this isn’t possible; I shall never repeat my unspeakable behaviour of the night we went to the Prom – I shall never hear any Elgar again in my life without shame. I know that you are right; my sister depends upon me in all sorts of ways – the blasted finances as you call them – and you have your parents, who have both come to depend on you. But sometimes I dream of us both becoming free to be alone together. You are all I want. I would live in a wigwam with you or a seaside hotel – the kind with paper carnations on the dinner tables and people with half-bottles of wine with their initials on the label. Or a Tudor bijou gem on the Great West Road, with a pink cherry and a laburnum tree and a crazy-paving path – anywhere, my dearest Ahry, would be transformed by you. If wishes were horses … I thought perhaps that I might—
Oh, Jenkins Minor! The dandruff rained down upon his fiddle from which came the most dreadful sounds – like some small animal caught in a trap. I sound cruel, but he lied to me about his practising – he is not a winning child. What I had been going to say was that if I rang early next week, perhaps the dear Duchy would have me for a night? Or failing that, to luncheon? Or – most bold of all – perhaps you could meet me at the station, and we could lunch somewhere in Battle and go for a walk? These are only wild suggestions; you need only say when I ring that it wouldn’t do for it not to do. Just to hear your voice will be wonderful. Write to me, my dear heart, write to me I beg—
‘Aunt Rach?’
Instinctively, she folded the letter and put it out of sight. ‘Yes, my dude. I’m here.’
‘Is it all right? You aren’t cross?’
Rachel got out of her bed and knelt on the floor beside her niece. ‘I was most honoured to be chosen.’ She stroked Clary’s fringe back from her forehe
ad. ‘We’ll have a lovely talk tomorrow. Go to sleep now. Are you warm enough?’
Clary looked surprised. ‘I don’t know. How do I feel?’
‘Warm enough.’ Rachel leaned down and kissed her.
‘If I’d really got rabies, you wouldn’t be able to kiss me ‘cos I’d bite, wouldn’t I?’
‘What have you been reading?’
‘Nothing. Someone told me about it at school. A horrible girl from South America. You wouldn’t like her, she’s so horrible.’
‘Goodnight, Clary, Off you go.’
‘Are you going to sleep now?’
‘Yes.’
So then, of course, she had to put the letter away and turn out the light.
On Saturday, Villy went riding with her father-in-law, Edward and Hugh played tennis with Simon and Teddy, Rupert took Zoë out to lunch in Rye, Polly and Louise took turns to have riding lessons on Joey, who, caught by Wren and doomed to an hour’s trotting and cantering pointlessly round the same old field, got his own back by puffing himself up when he was saddled so that the girths would hardly go round his huge grass-fed belly and then deflating so that the saddle slipped sideways and decanted Polly onto the ground. With Louise, he only managed to switch his tail so sharply that he stung her eyes when she was trying to mount him.
Clary took Lydia to see butterflies and then they found a heap of sand left by the builders and Clary had an idea. It’s quite a long idea,’ she said, sternly, because Neville was tagging along and she wanted to put him off, but it didn’t work. ‘I want to be in the idea, he said, so in the end she let him. Under her direction, they set about moving nearly all the sand to a secret place behind the potting shed.
Rachel picked more raspberries, and black and red currants for Mrs Cripps to make summer puddings, typed excerpts from John Evelyn’s Diaries for her father’s book, and finally joined Sybil under the monkey puzzle to tack yards of rufflette onto dark green chintz for the Duchy to machine after luncheon.
The Duchy had her morning interview with Mrs Cripps. The wreck of the salmon was inspected; it would not stretch to being served cold again with salad – was to be turned into croquettes for dinner to be followed by a Charlotte Russe (this was a compromise between them; Mrs Cripps did not like making croquettes, and the Duchy thought that Charlotte Russe was too rich in the evening). For Sunday lunch they would have the roast lamb and summer pudding. That settled, she was free to spend the morning in her garden; dead-heading, clipping the four pyramids of box that were stationed at the end of the herbaceous borders guarding the sundial with Billy to sweep up and clear away the clippings.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 14