‘Not at all,’ Clary said. She felt quite awed by Polly, never having met anyone who had fainted, and in any case Polly had a temperature and was thought to be starting chicken pox. So she went off to see Simon when Hugh arrived.
‘What ho, my pet. I hear you’re under the weather.’ He came and sat on her bed. ‘I’ve had chicken pox, so I’ll kiss you,’ he said. Her face felt very hot. Oscar lay beside her.
‘Well, Poll, it’s good news, isn’t it?’
‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘Do you know, Oscar got lost today? We found him up a tree and me and Clary held Teddy’s bicycle …’ and then she went into the whole thing.
‘Anyway, you got him back.’ Hugh stroked Oscar’s head and he sneezed.
‘All’s well now, then,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said listlessly, ‘in a way, of course, it is. In another way, of course, it isn’t.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘There was this box that Nora made us put promises in, you see, for if there wasn’t a war and now there isn’t so we have to do them. At least I feel I have to. That’s what it is.’
‘Do you want to tell me what you promised?’
‘I do,’ she said consideringly, ‘but I don’t want anyone else to know.’
‘Right.’
He drew his fingers across his throat, and she said, ‘Oh, Dad, don’t be so old-fashioned!’
‘I am so old,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’ They looked at each other and both burst out laughing, and that was more like Polly.
‘Well, it started with us going to church and I said I didn’t think I ought to go, because, Dad, you see, I’m not at all sure that I believe in God.’ She looked at his black silk stump and said, ‘In fact, I don’t. But Nora said that if we prayed for there not to be a war and there wasn’t one that would show me. So when it got to be promises I thought I’ll have to believe in God if there isn’t a war, so I put that in the box.’
She seemed only to pause, so he said, ‘And?’
‘Well, I feel just the same. I don’t feel the slightest belief. How can you make yourself believe in something? I mean pretending is useless, probably evil.’
‘I agree pretending is useless.’
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Er – you know, Poll, I’m not sure.’
‘You must have thought about it,’ she said severely, ‘by your age.’
‘Yes. Well, no, probably I don’t.’
‘I mean, supposing I start managing to believe and then we have a war.’ That’s it, he thought, she doesn’t believe the news.
‘Polly, there isn’t going to be one. Peace has broken out.’
‘I know that. But can you solemnly swear, Dad, that there never will be one?’
‘No.’
‘You see? Oh, I wish I’d given up sugar in my tea or something manageable like that!’
‘Could you swap?’
‘Dad! That would be cheating!’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think if you say every night that you wish you believed in God, and there is one, he’ll hear you.’
‘I don’t wish I believed.’
‘Well, then, you could say you wish you wanted to believe. I don’t see how you can do more.’
‘And the rest of the time carry on as usual?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s what ordinary life is, isn’t it? Carrying on as usual.’
‘Does that sound boring to you?’
‘It sounds it, but when you’re in it, it isn’t.’
When he kissed her she said, ‘Dad! Do you know what I love about you best? Your doubtfulness. All the things you don’t know.’ As he reached the door she called, ‘It really makes me admire you.’
Clary met Zoë and Rupert on their way downstairs and stopped and said, ‘Oh, hallo, Zoë! You do look nice. Pink is a very good colour on you.’ She was starting upon her promise from the box. How can I keep it up? she thought. Thinking of things to say like that every day. When she’d put the promise in the box, she’d thought she’d just have to invent things, but after Zoë had been truthful to her, she felt she ought to mean them – be truthful back. That meant going on and on and on about what Zoë looked like, because she had to admit that Zoë was extremely pretty and beautiful. On the other hand, she couldn’t think of anything else about her. I’ll just have to stick to her appearance, she thought.
‘I bet she knew there wasn’t going to be a war.’ Neville was very grumpy and felt Nora was to blame for the beastly prospect ahead of him.
‘The thing is the aunts will go home, and then you’ll be free. It’s much worse for us.’
‘Yes,’ said Judy. ‘It jolly well is.’
‘Can you imagine having no pocket money at all for a year? Having to live on Christmas and birthday presents for twelve whole months?’
‘Six for me, actually,’ Judy said. ‘I changed my mind just before I put the paper in the box.’ Lydia looked at her with loathing, and she went pink.
‘Really, it would have been much easier for us to have war,’ Neville said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded one at all. Aeroplanes and tanks everywhere – well, I’m extremely fond of them.’
‘That’s stupid, Neville. You might have got killed.’
‘I wouldn’t. From the sky I would be just the tiniest speck to a German – they wouldn’t even see me.’
There was a silence. Then he said, ‘What we could do is just not do any of it. Pretend we thought it was a joke.’
‘Oh, we couldn’t!’ both girls exclaimed, but he could see that they really didn’t mean it.
‘I shall, anyway,’ he said. ‘You can do as you like.’
‘Well, Miss Milliment, we could scarcely have foreseen such a happy outcome to the last terrible weeks.’
‘No, indeed, Lady Rydal.’ A little smile twitched her small mouth and disappeared into her chins. She had known Lady Rydal for many years, and happy outcomes were hardly her forte.
Villy came into the room. She was wearing the most attractive black frock. ‘Oh dear! You haven’t had your sherry!’
‘I didn’t want to cause Miss Milliment any trouble.’ This was the most delicate way she could think of to imply to Viola that one did not give governesses drinks, even if she was, due to difficult circumstances, having them to dinner. Democracy, she felt, should never be allowed to get into the wrong hands. But Viola did not take the hint.
‘I expect Miss Milliment has been dying for hers,’ she said as she handed them both a glass.
‘Hardly dying, Viola, but certainly looking forward.’ Miss Milliment sipped her drink with a grateful smile.
Lady Rydal baulked, eyed Miss Milliment’s banana-coloured ensemble with distaste. It looked like the kind of thing one might get in a shop.
‘Polly has gone down with chicken pox,’ Villy said. ‘I must say, I wish our brood here would get on with it.’
‘Then you would have hardly anyone to teach, Miss Milliment,’ Lady Rydal remarked. ‘However,’ she went on with what she felt was the uttermost kindness, ‘I’m sure you must be longing to get back to your own nice cosy little home with all your own things round you. I know that I am.’
Everybody else came into the room – Edward had brought two bottles of champagne – and the celebration began, but at intervals during the rest of the evening, and during the long and – in spite of Lady Rydal – merry dinner, which seemed to her full of laughter and affection and fun, and, perhaps most of all, when she slipped away for the dark walk back to the cottage, Miss Milliment thought of her home. She thought of the dingy room that was without heating unless she spent a fortune on the gas meter; of the lumpy bed and hard, thin blankets; the single ceiling light with a white china shade, not near enough to the bed for comfortable reading (in the winter one spent the evenings in bed as it was the easiest way to keep warm); the linoleum whose worn places she was in constant danger of tripping over; the coffee-coloured wallpaper with its frieze of oranges an
d pears. She thought of the window, hung with grey net curtains, through which there was nothing to be seen but the row of houses identical to the one she lived in: not a tree in sight, nothing to nourish the eye during those long evenings, when, after her solitary supper, she would have to spin out the hours, without company or distraction of any kind, until it was time to make her glass of hot water and retire for the night. All these things pressed sharply and uninvited into her mind, splintering the warmth, and celebration, company and comfort that surrounded her. Now, Eleanor, I won’t have you down in the dumps. Think how fortunate you have been to enjoy this wonderful change; this beautiful place, the country, this kind family. It has been a real oasis—but she could not go on with that.
In the cottage, she found Evie, whose bedroom door was open and room littered with luggage and belongings.
‘I am going home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I made a telephone call to my gentleman friend and I am needed in London. I knew I would be. I knew there wouldn’t be a war, but she never listens to me, my sister. She always has to be right.’ She seemed exhilarated and full of animation.
Miss Milliment wished her a pleasant journey and went to her room. She stood by the open window for some time enjoying the soft, warm and damp air on her face. There was a smell of woodsmoke and the scent of pine from some of the trees in the wood at the back. The black dog still sat on her shoulder and she thought that perhaps this was because she had so much wanted to see the sea – nine miles away in the dark, and that would not happen now. That might be it. You cannot expect to have your own way in everything, Eleanor. Wonderful scent of pine! She had become aware of it only today, when, before dinner, she had fulfilled her promise made for Nora’s box and had taken the packet of yellowing letters and put them in her father’s old oiled silk tobacco pouch – together with the lock of red hair – and gone up to the wood with them, and scraped a little grave in the soft leafy mould and buried them. Thus, when she died, there would be no prying, indifferent eyes to patronise his memory.
She had been meaning to do something of the kind for a very long time now, but it was not easy. She had so little to remember of him, and after all these years what memories that remained had become distant, faded fragments, small matters of mysteriously unrelated fact, only saved from crumbling to spectral fantasy by the few relics, now safely buried in the wood. Now that she could no longer read his letters she knew that the rest of him would slip away: already, she had noticed, invention had been taking the place of memory. She would say (to herself) things like, ‘He must have,’ instead of ‘He did’. She did not want to turn him into a bad biography.
She shut her eyes to recall him for the last time on the evening before he had left for South Africa, when he had taken her out in the garden, seized her hand and recited to her the end of ‘Dover Beach’.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new …
His quiet, high-pitched, rather pedantic voice (although he could not say his r’s) came magically back … and then she could not remember how the poem went on, and as she groped towards the darkling plain, it diminished, and was silent.
That was all.
If you enjoyed The Light Years,
you’ll love Marking Time, volume two in
The Cazalet Chronicles
Home Place, Sussex, 1939.
The English family at war …
The sunlit days of childish games and family meals are over, as the shadows of war roll in, and a new generation of Cazalets take up the story.
Louise, who dreams only of playing Hamlet, is brutally brought to the realisation that her parents have their own secrets, passions and yearnings. Clary, who religiously documents all aspects of her life in diaries and letters, learns that her father, who was in the Navy, is now missing somewhere on the shores of France. And sensitive, imaginative Polly feels stuck without a vocation or information about her mother’s illness – without anything except for her nightmares about the war.
‘This chronicle will be read, like Trollope, as a classic about life in England in our century’ Sybille Bedford
An extract follows here …
HOME PLACE
September 1939
Someone had turned off the wireless and, in spite of the room being full of people, there was a complete silence – in which Polly could feel, and almost hear, her own heart thudding. As long as nobody spoke, and no one moved, it was still the very end of peace …
The Brig, her grandfather, did move. She watched while – still in silence – he got slowly to his feet, stood for a moment, one hand trembling on the back of his chair as he passed the other slowly across his filmy eyes. Then he went across the room and, one by one, kissed his two elder sons, Polly’s father Hugh and Uncle Edward. She waited for him to kiss Uncle Rupe, but he did not. She had never seen him kiss another man before, but this seemed more of an apology and a salute. It’s for what they went through last time there was a war, and because it was for nothing, she thought.
Polly saw everything. She saw Uncle Edward catch her father’s eye, and then wink, and her father’s face contract as though he remembered something he could hardly bear to remember. She saw her grandmother, the Duchy, sitting bolt upright, staring at Uncle Rupert with a kind of bleak anger. She’s not angry with him, she’s afraid he will have to be in it. She’s so old-fashioned she thinks it’s simply men who have to fight and die; she doesn’t understand. Polly understood everything.
People were beginning to shift in their chairs, to murmur, to light cigarettes, to tell the children to go out and play. The worst had come to the worst, and they were all behaving in much the same way as they would have if it hadn’t. This was what her family did when things were bad. A year ago, when it had been peace with honour, they had all seemed different, but Polly had not had time to notice properly, because just as the amazement and joy hit her, it was as though she’d been shot. She’d fainted. ‘You went all white and sort of blind, and you passed out. It was terribly interesting,’ her cousin Clary had said. Clary had put it in her Book of Experiences that she was keeping for when she was a writer. Polly felt Clary looking at her now, and just as their eyes met and Polly gave a little nod of agreement about them both getting the hell out, a distant up and down wailing noise of a siren began and her cousin Teddy shouted, ‘It’s an air raid! Gosh! Already!’ and everybody got up, and the Brig told them to fetch their gas masks and wait in the hall to go to the air-raid shelter. The Duchy went to tell the servants, and her mother Sybil and Aunt Villy said they must go to Pear Tree Cottage to fetch Wills and Roly, and Aunt Rach said she must pop down to Mill Farm to help Matron with the evacuated babies – in fact, hardly anybody did what the Brig said.
‘I’ll carry your mask if you want to take your writing,’ Polly said while they hunted in their bedroom for the cardboard boxes that contained their masks. ‘Damn! Where did we put them?’ They were still hunting when the siren went again, not wailing up and down this time, just a steady howl. ‘All Clear!’ someone shouted from the hall.
‘Must have been a false alarm,’ Teddy said; he sounded disappointed.
‘Although we wouldn’t have seen a thing buried in that awful old shelter,’ said Neville. ‘And I suppose you’ve heard, they’re using the war as an excuse not to go to the beach, which seems to me about the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’
‘Don’t be so stupid, Neville!’ Lydia said crushingly. ‘People don’t go to beaches in wartime.’
There was a generally quarrelsome feeling in the air, Polly thought, although outside it was a mellow September Sunday morning, with a smell of burning leaves from McAlpine’s bonfire, and everything looked the same. The children had all been sent away from the drawing room: the grown-ups wanted to have a talk and, naturally, everyone not classed as one resented this. ‘It isn’t as though when we’re
there they make funny jokes all the time and scream with laughter,’ Neville said as they trooped into the hall. Before anyone could back him up or squash him, Uncle Rupert put his head round the drawing-room door and said, ‘Everyone who couldn’t find their masks bloody well go and find them, and in future they’re to be kept in the gun room. Chop chop.’
‘I really resent being classed as a child,’ Louise said to Nora, as they made their way down to Mill Farm. ‘They’ll sit there for hours making plans for all of us as though we were mere pawns in the game. We ought at least to have the chance to object to arrangements before they’re faits accomplis.’
‘The thing is to agree with them, and then do what one thinks is right,’ Nora replied, which Louise suspected meant doing what she wanted to do.
‘What shall you do when we leave our cooking place?’
‘I shan’t go back there. I shall start training to be a nurse.’
‘Oh, no, don’t! Do stay until Easter. Then we can both leave. I should simply loathe it without you. And anyway, I bet they don’t take people of seventeen to be nurses.’
‘They’ll take me,’ said Nora. ‘You’ll be all right. You’re nothing like so homesick now. You’re over the worst of all that. It’s bad luck you being a year younger, because it means you’ll have to wait to be really useful. But you’ll end up a much better cook than me—’
‘Than I,’ Louise said automatically.
‘Than I, then, and that’ll be terribly useful. You could go into one of the Services as a cook.’
A thoroughly uninviting prospect, Louise thought. She didn’t actually want to be useful at all. She wanted to be a great actress, something which she well knew by now that Nora regarded as frivolous. They had had one serious … not row, exactly, but heated discussion about this during the holidays, after which Louise had become cautious about her aspirations. ‘Actresses aren’t necessary,’ Nora had said, while conceding that if there wasn’t going to be a war it wouldn’t matter so much what Louise did. Louise had retaliated by questioning the use of nuns (Nora’s chosen profession, now in abeyance – partly because she had promised not to be one if there hadn’t been a war last year, and now ruled out in the immediate future because of the need for nurses). But Nora had said that Louise had no conception of the importance of prayer, and the need for there to be people who devoted their lives to it. The trouble was that Louise didn’t care whether the world needed actresses or not, she simply wanted to be one; it put her in a morally inferior position vis-à-vis Nora, and made a comparison of the worth of their characters an uncomfortable business. But Nora always pre-empted any possibility of covert criticism by hitting a much larger and more unpleasant nail on the head. ‘I do have awful trouble with priggishness,’ she would say, or, ‘I suppose if I ever get near being accepted as a novice, my wretched smugness will do me down.’ What could one say to that? Again, Louise really didn’t want to know herself with the awful familiarity employed by Nora.
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