‘Goodness! I’d forgotten that. What are you giving her?’
‘I can’t think. I don’t know really what she likes. She’s not a very happy little girl, is she? Rupert says she’s not doing well at school either. A bad report, order marks, and she doesn’t seem to have made any friends.’
‘I shouldn’t think Zoë would be very nice to them if she did.’
Neither of them liked Zoë, and both knew that they were about to embark upon a Zoë talk, which happened every holiday and always ended by them saying that they really must stop. This time they stopped because they had reached their destination – an old white-painted clapboard farmhouse, the ground floor of which had been rather casually converted into a shop. It sold a little of everything: groceries, vegetables, packets of seeds, chocolates, cigarettes, elastic and buttons, knitting wool, eggs, bread, Panama hats, trugs, willow-pattern mugs and brown teapots, flowered Tootal cottons, fly papers, bird seed and dog biscuits, door mats and kettles. Mrs Cramp produced a roll of white flannel and cut the five yards required. Mr Cramp, at the other counter, was cutting bacon in the machine. A heavily encrusted fly paper hung above it, and banged against his bald head every time he collected a slice and put it on the scales, and sometimes a long-dead fly fell like a dried currant onto the counter. His customer, in the middle of narrating some indeterminate misfortune, fell silent when Sybil and Villy entered the shop, and only the weather – not a drop of rain for two weeks and looking as though it would hold up for the harvest – was discussed while the ladies were in the shop.
‘And white wool, Mrs Hugh. Paton’s two-ply; would that be what you were after? Or we do have the fleecy Shetland.’
‘I’ll make the shawl,’ said Villy. They chose the Shetland, and Sybil bought a reel of white cotton.
‘Mrs Cazalet Senior keeping well, is she? That’s right.’
The flannel was wrapped in a piece of soft brown paper and tied with string. The wool was put into a paper bag. Mrs Cramp avoided Sybil’s stomach like title plague.
But as soon as Villy had left the shop, she said, ‘She’s near her time, or I’m a Dutchman.’
And Mrs Miles, who had been buying the bacon, said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it was twins.’
Mrs Cramp was shocked. It was her prerogative to remark on her customers. ‘They don’t have twins,’ she said. ‘Not ladies.’
In the car, Villy said, ‘Do you think it would be a good idea if Clary left school and joined our two with Miss Milliment?’
‘Very good for Clary. But do you think Rupert could afford it?’
‘Two pounds ten a week! It must be cheaper than her school.’
‘He probably gets a special rate for being a schoolmaster. He may not pay at all, except for the extras.’
‘Our two have extras.’
‘Rachel might help with those. Or the Duchy might speak to the Brig. Or you could – on one of your rides. He’d probably listen to you – you get on so well with him.’
‘Let’s talk to Rupert first.’ Villy ignored this compliment as she did all the others these days. ‘There would be fares, of course. She’d have to walk to Shepherd’s Bush and take the Underground. But I do feel it would be a family atmosphere for her, and that’s what she needs. I don’t think she gets much of that at home.’
Sybil said, ‘Of course, Zoë will start having a family one of these days.’
‘God forbid! I’m sure she doesn’t want babies.’
Sybil said, ‘As we all know, it isn’t always a question of wanting them.’
Villy glanced at her, startled. ‘Darling! Did you – not—’
‘Not really. Of course I’m pleased about it now.’
‘Of course you are.’ They were both treading water: not exactly out of their depths, but not wanting to feel their ground.
Most of Rupert’s and Zoë’s day was very good. They drove to Rye, quite slowly because Rupert was enjoying the first morning of his holidays and being in the country and the beautiful day. They drove past fields of wheat with poppies and fields of hops that were nearly ripe, through woods of oak and Spanish chestnut and lanes whose high banks were thick with wild strawberries and stitchwort and ferns, and hedges decorated by the last of the dog-roses bleached nearly white by the sun, through villages with white clinker-built cottages with their gardens blazing with hollyhocks and phlox and roses and sometimes a pond with white ducks, small grey churches with yew and lichen-covered tombstones, past fields of early hay, and farms with steaming manure and brown and white chickens finding things to eat. Sometimes they stopped, because Rupert wanted to look properly at things, and Zoë, although she didn’t really know why he wanted to, sat contentedly watching him. She loved his throat with the large Adams apple, and the way his dark blue eyes narrowed when he was staring at things and the small half-apologetic smile he gave her when he had looked enough, let in the clutch and resumed driving.
‘Oh, this country!’ he said once. ‘To me, it is the best in England.’
‘Have you been everywhere else?’
He laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just indulging in a spot of prejudice!’
On the last of these stops he got out of the car; she followed him, and they went and leaned on a gate. They were on a crest of land, where they could look down and away for miles with all the things that they had seen separately on the drive spread out before them in a vast expanse, green and golden and gilded, varnished by sunlight. Rupert took her hand.
‘Darling. Don’t you think that’s a ripping view?’
‘Yes. And the sky is such a lovely blue.’ She thought for a moment, and then added, ‘It’s the kind of blue that nothing else actually is, isn’t it?
‘You’re perfectly right … what a good remark!’ He squeezed her hand, delighted with her. ‘It’s the kind of thing that is so obvious that nobody says it. Notices it, I mean,’ he added, seeing her face. ‘No, really, Zoë darling, I mean that.’ And he did: he so much wanted her to be an appreciator – of something other than themselves.
In Rye he bought her presents. They were walking down one of the steep roads to the harbour and there was a very small shop window crammed with jewellery, small pieces of silver and, in front, there was a tray of antique rings. Rupert decided that he wanted to buy her one so they went inside. He chose a rose diamond one with black and white enamel round the hoop, but she didn’t like it. She wanted an emerald with rose diamonds round it, but it was twenty-five pounds – too much. So she settled for a fire opal surrounded by seed pearls and that was ten pounds, but Rupert got it for eight. They didn’t know it was a fire opal until the man told them, just thought it was a marvellous dazzling orange colour, but Zoë was much keener on it once she knew. ‘It’s really unusual!’ she exclaimed, holding out her white hand for them to see.
‘Wouldn’t suit everyone, madam, but it’s perfect on you.’
‘There, madam,’ said Rupert when they were outside. ‘And what would madam like to do next?’
She wanted a book to read in the evening when everyone was sewing and playing the piano and things. So they went to a bookshop, and she chose Gone With The Wind, which she knew everyone was reading and was said to have good passionate scenes in it. Then they had lunch in a pub – or rather in the garden outside it: ham and salad and Heinz’s mayonnaise and half a pint of bitter for Rupert and a shandy for Zoë. They didn’t talk about the children at lunch, or afterwards, when they went to Winchelsea because Rupert wanted to see the Strachan glass there, but as they were driving back to Home Place, Zoë said, ‘Oh, darling, we’ve had such a lovely time, and I do love my ring.’
Rupert said, ‘Haven’t we just? Now we must go back to the bosom of the family. The madding crowd.’
‘Madding?’
‘It’s a book by Thomas Hardy.’
‘Oh.’ What a lot he knew.
‘And we must think of something splendid to do with the children tomorrow.’
‘I should think they are quite happy with
their cousins, and everything.’
‘Yes. But I meant with all of them. Must do our bit.’
She was silent. He added gently, ‘You know, darling, I think you’d feel quite differently about family life if you had a baby. If we had one,’ he added.
‘Not yet. I don’t feel old enough.’
‘Well, one day you will be.’ She was twenty-two – a young twenty-two, he told himself.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we could afford it. Not unless you get another job. Or become famous, or something. We aren’t rich – like Hugh and Edward. They have a proper staff to do things. Sybil and Villy don’t have to cook.’
It was his turn for silence. Ellen did most of the cooking, and he and Clary were out to lunch every day, but poor little Zoë did hate cooking, he knew that, had not got much beyond the frying pan or tins in three years.
‘Well,’ he said at last, he couldn’t bear to disrupt their day out, ‘it was just a thought. Think about it.’
Just a thought! If he had had any idea of how she felt about having a baby, he wouldn’t even mention it. Her fear, which amounted to panic, meant that she never got beyond her imagination of pregnancy – getting larger and larger, her ankles swelling, waddling about, feeling sick – and the labour, frightful pain that might go on for hours and hours, might indeed kill her as it did some people she had read about in novels. And not only read about: look at Rupert’s first wife! She’d died that way. But even if she didn’t die, her figure would be ruined: she would have flabby breasts with the nipples too large, like Villy and Sybil whom she had seen in their bathing suits, her waist would be thick and she would have those fearful stripes on her stomach and thighs – Sybil again; Villy seemed to have escaped that – and varicose veins – Villy, but not Sybil – and, of course, Rupert would no longer love her. He’d pretend to for a bit, she supposed, but she would know. Because the one thing she knew for certain was that her appearance was what people were interested in or cared about: she hadn’t anything else, really, to attract or keep anyone with. She had used it all her life to get what she wanted, and she had never wanted anything so much as Rupert. So now she must use it to keep him. She knew, without thinking about it too much, that she wasn’t clever, either at doing things or at thinking about them; her mother had always said that this wasn’t important if you had the looks, and she had learned that very well. Why didn’t Rupert understand all this? He’d got two children anyway, and they cost a lot and were a constant source of anxiety. Sometimes she wished that he was thirty years older, too old for anyone but herself to care about – too old, anyway, to want to be a father, content with just being with her. In the three years of their marriage, he had only talked about having a baby twice before: once at the beginning, when he had assumed that she would want to get pregnant, and then about six months later when she had stupidly complained about what a nuisance Dutch caps were. He had said, ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. Why don’t you just stop using one, and let nature take its course?’ She had got out of that somehow – said that she wanted to get used to being married first or something, anything to stop him talking about it – and after that she had put the cap in long before he came from the school and never said any more about it at all. She had thought that perhaps he had given up the idea; now it was horribly clear that he hadn’t. The rest of the drive home was silent.
Clary worked hard all afternoon. To begin with, she worked feverishly against time, because she knew that when Lydia and Nev had finished their rest they would rush out and want to do things and get in the way and do things wrong. But they didn’t come out; in fact, the nurses had taken them for a hot, sulky walk up to the shop at Watlington, but as the time went by and they didn’t come, she felt able to take things more slowly, to stop and consider the next thing to do. The mirror was in place, sunk in the sand; it looked like water, and she edged it with moss which made it even better. She made a lovely hedge of tiny pieces of box stuck close together in the sand – had to do that twice, because she hadn’t made the sand firm enough to start with. Then she made a gravel path that ran beside the hedge to the lake, and then it seemed to need another hedge on its bare side, so she did that. Poor old Lydia’s daisies were drooping by now, so she pulled them out; it was no good putting flowers in, she needed plants. Also, she thought they ought to be planted in earth, very tiny fine earth, or they would die. She got some potting compost out of the potting shed and made a bed that started square and ended rather egg-shaped. She collected some scarlet pimpernel, and some speedwell – straggly, but it filled up the space – and some stone crop off the kitchen-garden wall and a very small fern. That helped, but there was still a lot of room, so she collected some heads of lavender and stuck them at the back in bunches. They looked like a plant if you put them like that, and they were dry things who wouldn’t mind just being stalks. They looked very good. It’ll take weeks to make the whole garden, she thought. It was one of the lovely things about it. She needed trees, and bushes, and perhaps a little seat for people to sit by the lake which she had constantly to polish with some spit, her finger and one of her socks, because it got sandy at the least little thing. There was the lawn to make, which would be tufts of grass planted close together and trimmed with Zoë’s nail scissors. The bell went for tea, and she didn’t want to go, but they’d be sure to come and find her if she didn’t. So she went, taking Neville’s shoe with her to please Ellen. Walking back to the house, she thought that perhaps she would like someone to see her garden: Dad, or Aunt Rach? Both of them, she decided.
After tea, all the children played the Seeing Game – one of the traditional holiday games devised by themselves. Teddy half felt that he had outgrown it, and Simon pretended to feel the same, but this was not true. It had been invented by Louise and was a kind of hide and seek, only you didn’t catch people; it counted if you saw them and could identify who they were, and involved constant mobility on the part of the hunted, who, when caught, were locked in an old dog kennel until rescued by a friend. The hunter won only if he succeeded in catching everybody and incarcerating them. Lydia and Neville, who spent most of the time in the kennel as they were easy to catch, enjoyed it most, because they were playing with the others, although they wailed that it was unfair to be caught so much, when Polly, for instance, was hardly caught at all. Hugh and Edward played tennis.
Villy and the Duchy played two pianos – Bach concern – and Sybil and Rachel cut out the nightdresses on the table in the morning room. Nanny read bits of Nursery World aloud to Ellen while she did the ironing. The Brig sat in his study writing a chapter about Burma and its teak forests for his book. The day, which had been hot and golden with a sky of unbroken blue, was settling to longer shadows with midges and gnats and young rabbits coming out into the orchard.
Flossy, who allowed Mrs Cripps to own her because of Mrs Cripps’s connections with food, got up from her basket chair in the servants’ hall, stretched her totally rested body, and slipped out of the casement window for her evening’s hunting. She was a tortoiseshell, with hard-wearing fur and, as Rachel had once observed, like most well-fed English people she hunted merely for the sport and was very unsporting in her methods. She knew exactly when the rabbits went into the orchard, and one of them, at least, would not stand a chance against her formidable experience.
When Rupert and Zoë returned from their outing, she had said that she was going to get her bath in before all the children and tennis players used the hot water. Rupert, alone in their bedroom, wandered to the window from which he could see his sister and Sybil sewing under the monkey puzzle. They sat in basket chairs on the smooth green lawn backed by the green-black yew hedge against which their summer dresses – Rachel’s blue and Sybil’s green had a kind of aqueous delicacy. A wicker table was set between them, littered with a sewing basket, a tea tray with willow-patterned cups; a pile of creamy material completed the scene. He did not need even the corner of the herbaceous border on one side, nor the corner of t
he white gate to the drive at the other. He wanted to paint, but by the time he got his materials prepared, they might be gone: he wanted to draw them from the window where he stood, but Zoë would be back and that would not do. He rummaged in his canvas bag for his largest drawing block and packet of oil pastels and slipped down the smaller staircase to the front door.
‘It’s not fair! You never said you’d stopped playing!’
Louise opened the kennel door.
‘We’re telling you now.’
‘We didn’t know till now. It’s not fair!’
‘Look, we’ve only just stopped,’ Polly said. ‘We couldn’t tell you before because we hadn’t.’
Lydia and Neville stumped out of the kennel. They had not wanted the game to stop and they hated it not being fair. Neither of them had had the chance to be the See-er.
‘Teddy and Simon are bored of it. They’ve gone on a hunt. There aren’t enough of us for a proper game.’ Clary joined them.
‘Anyway, it’s time for your baths. They’ll be coming for you any minute.’
‘God blast!’
‘Take no notice of him,’ Louise said in her most irritating voice.
‘Honestly, Louise, you are sickening! Too, too sickening!’
When Lydia said that she sounded exactly like Mummy’s friend, Hermione; Louise could not help admiring the mimicry, but she wasn’t going to say so. She didn’t want two actresses in the family, thank you very much. She gave Polly their secret signal and they ran – suddenly, and very fast – away from Lydia and Neville, who started to follow them, but were quickly out of sight. The wails of rage only drew Ellen’s and Nanny’s attention to their whereabouts and they got carried off for their baths.
When Clary went to find Dad and Aunt Rachel to show them her garden, she found she couldn’t have either of them. Dad was sitting on the large wooden table used for outdoor tea drawing Aunt Rach and Aunt Syb, alternatively staring at them, then making sudden irritable marks on his pad. She stood watching him for a bit: he was sort of frowning, and every now and then he drew a deep, sighing breath. Sometimes he rubbed the marks he had made with his finger. In his left hand he held a small bunch of chalks, and sometimes he stuffed the one he had been using back and took another one. Clary thought that she could hold the bunch of chalks for him, but as she moved nearer to say this, Aunt Rach put her finger to her lips so she didn’t say anything. And she couldn’t go and ask Aunt Rach to come because then she would be in the picture, so she just sat down on the grass and watched her father. A lock of his hair kept falling forward across his bony forehead and he kept pushing or shaking it back. I could hold his hair back for him, she thought. Why can’t there be something like that I could do for him, so that he couldn’t do without me? ‘Clary is indispensable,’ he would say to people who came to admire his painting. By now, she was grown up, with her hair in a bun and skirts down her legs like the aunts, and her face was thin and interesting, like Dad’s, and people – in taxi cabs and orangeries like Kensington Gardens – proposed to her, but she would give them all up for Dad. She would never marry because of being so terrifically indispensable, and since Zoë had died from eating potted meat in a heatwave – known to kill you according to the Duchy – she was all that Dad had in the world. Dad would be famous, and she would be …
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 16