The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She was half-way up the stairs before her mother’s icy voice stopped her. ‘Where on earth do you think you are going? Go to the kitchen and get a cloth and a dustpan and brush and clear up the appalling mess you have made.’

  She turned and got the things, and went back into the room, and picked the pieces of china off the floor, and swept up the tea-leaves, and mopped at the tea, until Eileen, who had been sent for to make more tea, came and helped her, while her mother expatiated on the variety of her clumsiness: ‘The only girl who is staying at her domestic science school for three terms because she broke so many pudding basins during her first two.’ There had been a feeling of unease in the room as nobody else seemed able to think of anything to say, and by the time she had finished the clearing up, her hand was hurting very much. When she had taken the dustpan et cetera back to Eileen she went to find the Duchy to apologise, but she didn’t seem to be anywhere, although she did find Aunt Rach who was sewing name tapes on Neville’s clothes for his new school. ‘I don’t know where she is, my duck. What’s up? You look a bit under the weather.’

  Louise burst into tears. Aunt Rach got up, shut the door, and led her to the sofa. ‘You can tell your old aunt,’ she said, and Louise did.

  ‘She hates me! Really and truly, she must hate me – in front of all those people! She treated me as though I was a stupid little ten-year-old, and the way she goes on just makes me more clumsy than I would be if only she’d shut up.’ There was a pause, and then she added, ‘She never says anything friendly to me.’ At this, Aunt Rach gave her hand an affectionate squeeze, but it was the bad hand. Aunt Rach looked at it, and then got the first-aid stuff; she lit the spirit lamp that the Duchy used for making tea, heated up the paraffin wax, waited and then coated the scald with it, which hurt very much at first, but by the time her hand was being bandaged, it had begun to feel better.

  When all that was done, Aunt Rach said, ‘Darling, of course she doesn’t hate you. But you must remember, she’s having a difficult time with your dad away. Married people are meant to be with each other, and when they can’t be it is often harder for the woman because she is left at home and doesn’t know what is happening to her husband. You must try and understand that. When people get as old as you, they do begin to realise that their parents are not just their parents, but people, with troubles of their own. But I expect you are noticing that.’

  And Louise, who hadn’t been at all, said yes, she did see. And she had tried to think about them like that, and now, as she fastened the cream silk shirt that Aunt Rach had made for her, she thought that it must be pretty rotten for her mother to have her mother practically going off her head and having to be taken to a nursing home. And living practically on her own at Lansdowne Road never knowing when Dad would get leave, which didn’t seem to happen very often – her father was organising the defence of an aerodrome at Hendon. He had only spent two days with them at Christmas, which was better than Uncle Rupert, though, who hadn’t got leave from the Navy at all.

  She enjoyed the concert more than any she had ever been to. This was partly, she thought, because she knew the pianist (at least, she’d had lunch with him), and partly because, the Duke’s hall being full of parents and relatives and friends of the performers, there was an unusual air of excitement and it was full.

  There was an overture, and then a pause while the piano was moved into position and then the conductor returned with Peter, looking almost swamped by his tail coat. It was the third concerto of Rachmaninoff – the one with the amazingly long and mysterious opening melody. The moment he began to play, Peter seemed transformed. At lunch he really had not looked as though he had such powers – of technique, of rapt attention to the music as a whole. She felt slightly in awe of him after that.

  Next day they went shopping.

  ‘Do you see your parents as people?’ she asked Stella.

  ‘Sometimes when they’re with other people, I do. Not much when I’m alone with them though. But that’s because they like being parents so much. They don’t seem to notice my age, at all.’

  ‘But don’t you notice what they’re like with each other?’

  ‘Yes, but their relationship is playing mothers and fathers. That’s what they do with each other all the time.’

  ‘A pretty poor look-out for them when you and Peter are completely grown up.’

  ‘It won’t make the slightest difference. Even Aunt Anna concentrates now on being an aunt.’

  ‘Has she always lived with you?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. She came to stay one summer: her husband couldn’t come with her for some reason – Uncle Louis is a lawyer in Munich – and then she got a telegram from him just saying, “Don’t come back.” And then she was going to all the same, but he rang up my father and after that my father said she must do as she was told.’

  ‘So she’s been here ever since last summer?’

  ‘Since the summer before that. It’s awful for her, because her daughter got married that year, and now she’s had a baby, and Aunt Anna has never seen it.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘My father knows why, but he won’t talk about it. He’s been trying to get Uncle Louis here, but so far no luck. She cooks for us because she hasn’t got any money, and Father says it’s good for her to have a lot to do.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though he’s trying very hard to come here. Your uncle, I mean.’

  Stella began to deny this, but then bit her lip and was silent.

  ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘How brilliant of you! I do not.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ She minded Stella’s sarcasm very much.

  They were on top of a bus, in front, on their way to Sloane Square and Peter Jones. Louise felt that the expedition was going to be spoiled if they didn’t make it up before they got there. Just as she was thinking this, Stella laid a hand on her knee and said, ‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to be beastly. The main reason he doesn’t come is that he has parents – awfully old – and a sister who looks after them. See? Now, what are we going to buy?’

  And they reverted to a conversation that had been recurring for some weeks now. They could only buy one decent garment each and had been measuring themselves against the bedroom door at school all the term to see if they had stopped growing, and Stella had, but Louise had not.

  ‘You could buy a skirt if it had a decent hem.’

  ‘They don’t nowadays.’ Louise thought of clothes when she’d been a child, frocks with enormous hems, and even bodices that would let out for when you grew. ‘I wouldn’t mind a nice jacket that would go with everything.’

  ‘We’ll go over the whole shop first before we buy anything.’

  They were so long in the shop that Stella had to ring home to explain that they would not be back to lunch. It was clear that she dreaded doing this, but luckily she got Aunt Anna. The conversation was conducted in German, so Louise did not know until afterwards that Stella had said they had met a school friend and her mother, who insisted on them going back to their house for lunch. ‘So now we won’t get any lunch unless we buy some,’ Stella said when she had finished. They were both quite hungry, but neither wished to spend their precious allowance on food. ‘And Pappy will give us a wonderful dinner,’ Stella said. The shopping took so long because they could not make up their minds, and were scrupulously fair about letting whoever was trying on, try on as much as they liked. In the end, Louise bought a light woollen dress the colour of pale green leaves, and Stella bought a blazer with brass buttons. And then Louise decided that, after all, she would buy the pair of deep terracotta linen trousers she had found earlier that were only two pounds as they were left over from the winter sale. ‘They’re Daks, from Simpson’s,’ Louise said proudly. She did look very nice in them, Stella thought enviously. Her father would have a fit if he saw them: he would not countenance any woman in trousers. When she said this, Louise said that her mother would think they were ridiculous too, but they were e
xtremely suitable for someone who was going to be an actress. Stella then decided to buy the shoes she had seen that she longed for – scarlet sandals with huge cork wedges. ‘They won’t go down well at home,’ she said. By now extremely hungry, they bought half a pound of Rowntrees’ Motoring Chocolate and ate it in the buses on the way home.

  ‘What a heavenly outing. You’re the best person in the world to go shopping with, Louise.’

  Louise, flushed with pleasure at being so appreciated, answered, ‘So are you.’

  Going back to the flat was like entering a sort of foreign cave, Louise thought – it seemed so dark and mysterious, with its gilded mirrors and glinting pieces of coloured glass from the little Venetian chandeliers with small candle bulbs that spasmodically lit the long passage. Scents of cinnamon, sugar and vinegar, and Mrs Rose’s scent had almost to be brushed aside by their movements: the airy, rocking sound of Schumann’s Papillon came from the drawing room.

  ‘Pappy is out!’ Stella announced. Louise could not imagine how she knew this, but her glee and relief were evident. ‘We have to show my mother what we have bought.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘As Pappy is out, I think everything. She adores clothes.’

  Mrs Rose was lying on the sofa draped in a black silk shawl embroidered with brightly coloured unlikely flowers. It had an immensely long silk fringe that kept catching in everything – her long earrings, the kind that most people would only wear in the evenings, Louise thought, the rings on her fingers, the braid edging the sofa and even the spine of the book she was reading. She put her finger on her lips, and then said, very quietly, ‘Your father is out.’ There was the same kind of gleeful conspiracy in her voice as there had been in Stella’s. ‘And what did your friend give you for lunch?’

  ‘Oh – some kind of fish pie – nothing wonderful. And bread and butter pudding.’ She knelt by her mother, threw her arms round her, gave her several kisses and turned the book from her hands. ‘Rilke again! You must know him by heart!’

  Peter stopped playing. ‘And we had hare and Aunt Anna’s red cabbage. And then those pancakes with quince,’ he said. ‘Come on – let’s see what you’ve bought.’

  ‘We will have a dress show,’ Mrs Rose said.

  ‘We haven’t bought all that much.’

  ‘If your mother doesn’t like you to wear trousers, they won’t like me in them,’ Louise said as she pulled the green woollen dress over her head.

  ‘That’s different. Anyway, it’s my father who doesn’t like that sort of thing. Mutti is far more broad-minded.’

  ‘You go first.’

  ‘No, you must – you’re the guest.’

  Afterwards Louise thought how extraordinarily different the Roses were from her family. The idea of parading in clothes after a shopping expedition in front of her family – and particularly her mother – made her want to laugh, only she didn’t laugh. About the only person in the family with whom one could possibly do that would be Aunt Zoë, whom she knew was privately criticised for taking clothes and her appearance so seriously. Mrs Rose had both looked at and then examined each item: she had said, ‘Very pretty’ about the green dress; she had admired Stella’s jacket; she was enigmatic about the trousers. She said that she did not like Stella’s red shoes, but that she would have bought them at Stella’s age. Peter’s contribution was to play snatches of what he clearly thought were wittily appropriate pieces of music: ‘Greensleeves’ and the ‘Marche Militaire’ for Louise, Chopin and Offenbach for his sister.

  Then everybody dispersed for serious rests before dressing for the theatre, which, Louise discovered to her delight, was to be Rebecca, with Celia Johnson and Owen Nares. ‘And supper at the Savoy afterwards,’ Peter said. ‘I hope you girls didn’t have too much lunch.’

  ‘Not too much,’ Stella replied. When all was quiet, she sneaked off to the kitchen and got some gingernuts and milk for them. They lay and read the books they had given each other, and tried to make the biscuits last.

  On her bed beside Stella she thought how lucky she was and how the war didn’t seem to be spoiling anything. ‘One of the things I like best about friendship’, she said, ‘is just doing whatever you want to do with the other person there, but you don’t have to talk to them.’

  Stella didn’t reply, and Louise saw that she was asleep. She put out her hand and touched the wonderfully soft dark hair. ‘I love you,’ she said but not aloud. It was wonderful to be free; to be able to leave her home, to start to find out about other people who were not her family. Anything could happen, she thought, anything! And I really want it to – whatever it is. I shan’t marry – I’ll just concentrate on being the best actress in the world. They’ll all be amazed by me at home. I’ll be the only famous Cazalet. Really, her family were extraordinarily ordinary. They weren’t anything like as interesting as the Roses. They just seemed to muddle along with nothing much ever happening to them: they never went abroad – in fact if it wasn’t for them she might have been all over the place by now which would have given her useful experience. But no. All they did was get married, and go to the office, and have children. They weren’t remotely interested in the arts, except, she had to admit, music, but when had her mother last read a Shakespeare play? Or any other play for that matter? And her father never read anything at all. It was amazing how he got through life so starved of any artistic nourishment. Perhaps she ought to try to rescue Polly and Clary from this bourgeois desert. She would, when they were old enough. The others were either still just children, or with her parents’ lot, past saving. You couldn’t possibly have a decent conversation about anything that really mattered – like the state of the theatre, or poetry, or even politics – look how much Stella knew compared to them! She bet they never thought about class structure or democracy or what would be fair to people. But if things turned out how Stella seemed to think they would, they would be in for an awful shock. No servants! What on earth would they do without them? At least she knew how to cook now, which was more than could be said for any of them. If there was a social revolution, they would probably starve. She began to feel sorry for them in an angry kind of way: it was all their own fault, but still that didn’t make it any better for them, as she well knew when things were her own fault. But, then, given the outstanding dullness of their lives, their senses were probably so blunted that they would not notice anything much: for instance, instead of being wildly, passionately in love like Juliet, or Cleopatra – who was old, after all, by the time she loved Antony – they were just fond of each other in a lukewarm unemotional way, so a giant social revolution would probably seem to them simply rather a nuisance. They seemed to have no experience of extremes, she thought, and that is what I am going to have. That’s the point.

  ‘It’s only part of the point,’ Stella said, as they dabbed Arrid under their arms after their bath. ‘I mean, you can’t live constantly at a pitch of joy or misery. The people you cite died anyway,’ she added, ‘and there’s surely not much point in loving somebody so much you have to die.’

  ‘That was just bad luck.’

  ‘Tragedy is never just bad luck. Tragedy is not taking everything into account, usually one’s own nature. I’m not going in for tragedy – not me.’

  As usual she was silenced by Stella, who was, she felt, the most intelligent person she had ever met.

  They all assembled in the drawing room for a glass of champagne and little pieces of salty fish on biscuits. Everybody looked extremely festive: Peter and Mr Rose in dinner jackets, Mrs Rose statuesque and romantic in yards of pleated black chiffon, Stella wearing her wine red taffeta, square-necked, with tight sleeves to her elbow, and Louise (profoundly grateful to Stella for making her bring an evening dress) in her old coral pink satin that fitted like a glove to her hips and was drawn into a kind of bustle at the back.

  ‘What beautiful ladies I am taking tonight!’ exclaimed Mr Rose, with such enthusiasm that they all felt more beautiful. Peter was sent to fetch a cab,
wraps and cloaks were put on, and the women got into the lift with Mr Rose: Peter was told to walk down. ‘You smile,’ Stella’s father said in the lift to Louise. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she answered without thinking.

  ‘The best reason,’ he said. In some ways he must be a very good father, she thought.

  In the cab, Peter teased them about how they would be bound to fall in love with Owen Nares, who was playing de Winter.

  ‘And why should we do that, pray?’ Stella inquired, bristling.

  ‘He’s a matinée idol. All girls fall in love with him. And old ladies, of course. The ones with tea trays on their knees.’

  ‘I shall have to be very careful then,’ his mother said, whereupon her husband seized her hand and said, ‘“To me, fair friend, you never can be old—”’

  ‘“For as you were, when first your eye I ey’d – so seems your beauty still—”’ Louise continued.

  ‘Go on.’

  Louise looked at him and began to blush: ‘“Three winters cold …”’ She went steadily on to the end.

  There was a short acknowledging silence, and then Mrs Rose put her fingers to her lips and laid them on Louise’s hand. Mr Rose said: ‘That is education. That is what I mean. Mark that, Stella. You could not have finished that.’