There had been a heavy dew and the long meadow was full of rabbits. He wished that he had brought his gun, but Dad had said no shooting when he was on his own. Then he remembered that he’d seen a bow and arrows in the tent – his tent, he thought defiantly and feeling angrier because deep down he knew this wasn’t true, it had been given to all of them. Stupid, to give something that was only any good for two people to dozens of people. It had become his tent because only he and Simon had ever used it, and it was more his than Simon’s because he was the eldest.
He found the bow and arrows. There didn’t seem to be very many of them; Christopher must have made them because Simon wouldn’t know how to do that sort of thing, and he had to admit that the arrows looked quite good, tipped with goose feathers neatly trimmed, and the points had been slightly charred and then sharpened. He decided to practise before he went after the rabbits, and that turned out to be a good idea as it was far harder to aim right than he had thought. The trouble was that he kept losing the arrows. To begin with, he didn’t bother too much if he couldn’t find one, but when he was down to the last two he hunted more seriously, but in the wood, with all the bracken and dead leaves and stuff growing, the arrows were hard to find. When he couldn’t find even the last one, he went back to the glade and opened up the tent to see if there were more but he couldn’t find any. So he rummaged for more food – the marmalade sandwiches seemed hours ago. He found some eggs and a frying pan, and decided to make a fire. There was a site where they had had fires. So he collected twigs, and he used some sheets from an exercise book in the tent for paper. In the middle of getting the fire going Christopher arrived, before he’d even had time to go through the tent properly. It was nothing like eleven o’clock, which was the time they were supposed to meet.
Christopher had not been able to eat much dinner the previous night – apart from his head aching, two of his front teeth were wobbly and when he tried to bite anything they sort of waved about his mouth making him feel slightly sick. He excused himself immediately after the meal, and crept upstairs to his room. He’d gone in and flung himself on the bed before he realised that there was a hat on it, which by then he had crushed rather. He leapt up and tried to unsquash it but it didn’t seem to want to, kept collapsing back into a squashed position. In the end he put it on a chair in a dark corner of the room where the owner might not notice it till morning, and went along the passage to the little box room where a bed had been made up for him. But then he couldn’t sleep. Being a conscientious objector obviously involved never losing your temper, since the moment that happened he had simply gone for Teddy without thinking, which was awful. How could one guarantee never to lose one’s temper? And what on earth was he going to do about Teddy? Tell him? But he sensed that Teddy would not be sympathetic to the idea of running away and, if he wasn’t he would almost certainly tell people where they had gone. But now that Teddy knew their hideout, he’d tell them, anyway, wouldn’t he? Could they move the camp? That seemed almost impossible: it had taken two weeks to assemble all the stuff there and it was the perfect site. It would be no good making one where the stream wasn’t, which meant that even if he moved it it would be easy for Teddy to track and find him. Him – what about Simon? From the moment of the chicken pox meeting, he had realised that Simon’s heart was not a hundred per cent in their adventure. He hadn’t wanted to go to school, but due to the chicken pox that was postponed and, then, if there was a war, Simon seemed to think that schools might stop and he’d never have to go to one. So although he had carried on as though they were both in it together, he’d started not counting Simon. He might find another stream in another wood … but he was running out of time, and really he knew that there wasn’t such a place within striking distance.
He seemed to wrestle with these hopeless possibilities all night, but he must have slept because he came to with the early-morning sun and it was half past seven, much later than he usually woke, and when he went downstairs he could hear the servants having breakfast. He took a handful of Grape Nuts from the cereal packet and set off for the wood.
When he woke, he had suddenly felt that there was a solution – there must be. Peaceful people always won in the end: all they had to do was be appeasing and persuasive, to stick to their guns. What a funny way of saying it, he thought. Guns were the last thing he wanted to have anything to do with, and in any case he hadn’t got any. It was Teddy who used a gun.
He would try and find out what Teddy really wanted, he thought, as he jogged up the road, or what he wanted most, and then, probably, there would be some way of giving it to him, and then everything would be all right. If it was the tent he wanted, and some of the stores, they could be divided up. If it was that he wanted Simon to camp with? Simon was much younger and really he was in no position to mind effectively what decisions were made about him – well, he could have Simon. If it was the territory that he was after they would have to come to an agreement somehow. If they drew up an agreement – a treaty – then Teddy would have to stick to it if he signed, as of course he would if he signed. He would apologise for the fight, losing his temper, and sit down in a really reasonable way to get a fair agreement.
What he had not bargained for was finding Teddy already on the site, not where they were supposed to meet, which had been arranged to be the kennels at eleven o’clock which it wasn’t – anything like. When he discovered that Teddy had been using his bow and had lost all the arrows, he started to feel his terrible, unacceptable anger, but this time he swallowed it down and managed to make his apology for the fight, and said he would write down Teddy’s terms for proper consideration. In the tent, he found that his precious exercise book with all the lists and things in it had had pages torn out so that some of the lists were missing. Another test. And, when putting up with even this maddening depredation – anyone could light a fire without paper if they knew how – he sat down to listen to Teddy, he discovered that Teddy’s terms had mysteriously got much worse than they had been yesterday …
Zoë woke when Eileen brought in their early-morning tea, but she kept her eyes half closed while Eileen placed the tray carefully on the table beside her, drew the curtains and murmured that it was half past seven. Rupert, beside her, was deeply asleep. She sat up and poured out some tea for both of them. Moving hurt – she was still very sore, and when Rupert had made love to her last night it had been painful, but she knew that she had concealed that from him. If only it was a bit of pain that she had to contend with, she thought, that would be nothing, no less than she deserved. But it was much more than that: he had been so trusting, so tender and considerate of her pleasure, and all she had been able to respond with had been more lies. She had felt gratitude and pain and altogether unworthy. The gap between her body and her heart seemed an abyss and all she was conscious of wanting was confession – to tell him everything, to be punished and forgiven and be able to start afresh. But she couldn’t tell him, she could never tell anyone; if she had simply been raped perhaps it would have been possible, but it had not been rape – at all – and she could neither lie about that nor tell him. That’s my punishment, she thought. To have to go on lying for the rest of my life.
‘Darling! You’re looking very tragic! What is it?’
As she turned away to reach for his teacup she felt her eyes pricking.
‘I wasn’t nearly nice enough to Mummy,’ she said, remembering that that was also true.
He took the cup from her. ‘Bet you were, pet. It’s worn you out. How would you like me to bring you a lovely tray in bed?’
She shook her head, wishing he would not keep being so kind to her.
‘I thought you might like to come to Hastings with me this morning. I want some more paints, and I wouldn’t mind a couple of brushes if I could find anything decent.’ He knew how she loved little jaunts alone with him.
‘I thought perhaps I ought to help the Duchy with all the things about furnishing the cottage. Rachel said there was an awful lot to
get done by this evening.’ The thought of the morning alone with him was too much for her.
‘Darling, what could you do? You know you hate all that sort of thing. I’m sure she won’t expect you to.’
‘I don’t suppose she would.’ Nobody expected anything of her, she thought, forlornly.
‘Well, you can decide after breakfast. I’m off to try my luck with the bathroom. Do you want one? A bath, I mean?’
‘No. I had one last night.’ The tops of her arms were bruised, and she did not want him to see. When he had gone, she got up and dressed quickly in an old pair of slacks and a shirt of Rupert’s and tied her hair back with a bit of black ribbon. Then she simply sat at the dressing-table, thinking that this time yesterday she had been at her mother’s flat packing, trying to think how to face Rupert. And now, twenty-four hours later, she was back to married life as though nothing had happened at all, sitting in this familiar room that, when she had first seen it, she thought old-fashioned and dull, but now the wallpaper of huge imaginary peacocks, the paisley cotton curtains, the thick, white lace runner on the dressing table, the plain rosewood furniture and the prints of the British Raj in India, the subdued Turkey carpet with the stained and waxed boards surrounding it, all seemed familiar, comforting – even luxurious, in comparison to the pinched gentility of her mother’s flat. How she had always hated it and its predecessor where she had lived until she was married! But now it occurred to her that perhaps her mother didn’t like it much either, that lack of money had prevented her from having what she might have liked, whatever that might be. And her chief reason for there not being enough money had been herself. Her mother had gone out to work in order to send her to a good school, had spent more money on Zoë’s clothes and amusements than she had ever spent upon herself. I just took everything I could get, and then got the hell out, she thought. I’ve never been nice to her – never been grateful, and she realised with a shock of shame that as her mother had become older and more frail she had actually become afraid of her, and that she, Zoë, had known this and had not cared, had complacently, even, found it easier to ration her visits, her telephone calls, any kind of minimal attention. She must change – somehow. But how? She thought of how Rachel or Sybil or Villy and sometimes the Duchy would say of one of the children when they behaved badly, ‘It’s only a phase’, but that was always about one thing, and they were children. She was twenty-three and it seemed that she needed to change everything.
Rupert, back from the bath, announced, ‘I need another shirt. This one’s got three buttons off – I look like Seth in Cold Comfort Farm.’
‘I’ll sew them on for you.’
‘It’s all right, darling, Ellen will do it.’
‘Do you think I can’t even sew on a button?’
‘Of course not. It’s just that Ellen always does it, that’s all.’ He was tucking a different shirt into his trousers. ‘You’ve always said how you loathed mending.’
‘I can at least sew on a button,’ she said, and burst into tears.
‘Zoë! Darling, what is it?’ He did not say ‘now’, but she sensed it from the tone of his voice.
‘You think I’m perfectly useless! That I can’t do anything!’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘When I said I wanted to help with the cottage this morning, you didn’t want me to. And now I can’t even sew a button on your shirt!’
‘I thought you didn’t want to do those things. Of course you can if you want to.’
But this did not suit her new resolution.
‘I might want to do things whether I wanted to or not,’ she said, aware, as she said it, that this did not sound how she meant it to.
‘All right, darling, you do what you don’t want to do if you like,’ he said. ‘You look very sweet and businesslike, I must say. Shall we go and have some breakfast?’
‘You look rather like a horse – but not very—’
‘Like one of those horses that wear things on their faces with just their eyes and nose showing, you know in the Crusades,’ Nora added.
‘The thing is, they’re no good for breathing at all.’ Neville was wheezing in his chair at the tea table: he had had asthma in the car after they had collected the gas masks.
‘I simply adore mine! I look so different in it.’ Lydia stroked the box hanging on the back of her chair.
‘We all look different.’
‘I don’t think Miss Milliment would,’ Lydia said pensively. ‘I should think it would be very difficult for a German to tell whether she was in hers or not.’
‘That will do, Lydia,’ Ellen said, ‘and hand the bread and butter to your cousin.’
‘Mummy said if we wear them for five minutes every day, we’ll soon get used to them.’ Nora realised that Neville had been frightened, and was kindly trying to encourage him.
‘I shall wear mine nearly all the time except for meals. It’s true you can’t eat in them. You couldn’t kiss anyone either.’
‘Drink your milk, Neville.’
He did, and then he said, ‘I know a good thing. If the great-aunts were kept in them, we’d never have to kiss them.’
‘Oh, poor them!’ said Judy in her most affected voice.
‘It’s all very well for you. They’re not your great-aunts. Guess what their poor old faces feel like!’
‘Very old strawberries,’ Neville said at once. ‘All softy and bluey – with damp fur.’
‘That’s just one,’ Lydia said. ‘The other one is – is – like kissing a huge dog biscuit. All hard and leathery with holes.’
‘That will do, Lydia,’ Ellen said again.
‘Why will it always do for me and not for Neville?’
‘That will do from both of you.’
‘Aunt Lena’s face was like kissing blancmange,’ Judy said, ‘and Grania’s—’
‘Shut up,’ Nora said sharply. ‘Aunt Lena’s dead. You shouldn’t say anything at all about her.’
In the rather surprising silence that followed, she poured a cup of tea to take up to Louise, who was lying down with a headache.
It was indeed oppressive, Miss Milliment thought, as she zigzagged lightly up the hill to Home Place after tea with Angela. After the collection of the gas masks, she made herself useful reading those portions of The Times to Lady Rydal that she wished to hear: the obituaries, the Court Circular, and some of the letters. She had expressed her desire to visit Clary to dear Viola and Jessica, and Angela had volunteered to conduct her up the hill. She was a very pretty girl, astonishingly like her mother had been at that age (Miss Milliment had taught Viola and Jessica until they were seventeen and eighteen respectively), but she seemed most withdrawn, whereas Jessica had always been such an outgoing girl full of good humour and spirits. She tried talking to Angela about France, but Angela did not seem to want to talk about that at all, and Miss Milliment, reflecting that, at her age, Angela had probably fallen in love with some young Frenchman from whom she was now parted, tactfully changed the subject.
‘Your uncle was telling me that he has been painting you. Do you think that there is a chance that I might see it?’
And Angela, who had been striding ahead, stopped at once and, turning round, said eagerly, ‘Oh! I wish you would! I went this morning to sit, but he said he thought it was finished. It doesn’t look like that to me at all! I should be so glad of your opinion!’
So they went in at the front door, through a room where old Mrs Cazalet, in a hat, was machining curtains, into an enormous hall where supper was being laid for the children, down a passage, rather dark, and she nearly tripped but that was because one of her shoelaces had come undone – they were not really long enough to tie double bows – through a baize door to a long, dark room with a billiard table in it and a bow window at one end. And there was the picture. An interesting portrait, Miss Milliment thought. He seemed to have captured the paradoxical ardour and languor of a young girl – that air that was both expectant and passive – and she notice
d that the mouth, often the Achilles heel if one could think of it like that for many painters, had been made far easier in this case because Angela had her mother’s mouth, a pre-Raphaelite affair, full but finely chiselled, a clear case of nature imitating art, but here a cliché that did not require the artist’s creative perception … fashionable portrait painters, of course, had always imposed features upon people: the rose-bud mouth of Lely, for example …
‘You see what I mean? My skin looks all blotchy. He wanted my hair all straight like that,’ she added.
‘I don’t think anyone but the painter can decide when he has finished,’ Miss Milliment said. ‘And there is a danger, I believe, of painters overpainting a portrait. I think it is most interesting, and you should feel honoured to have been the subject.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 39