And Stella said, ‘Of course not. Louise is wonderful. She practically knows him by heart.’
And Louise, slightly intoxicated by her success, said, ‘I don’t know anything else, much. Nothing like as much as Stella.’
But this only seemed to make the Roses approve of her more.
If anything was needed to fill her cup, it was discovery that they were in a box, something that had never happened to her before. Her family always chose the dress circle, although she had always had the secret wish to be in the front row of the stalls. But a box! It combined luxury and romance: she felt important just being there. She was settled in front with Mrs Rose and Stella and a programme was placed on the velvet shelf in front of her. Mrs Rose unbuttoned a small leather case to reveal a pretty pair of pink enamelled opera glasses which she offered as soon as Louise exclaimed at its prettiness. ‘You can watch the people arrive. It is sometimes very amusing,’ she said. The glasses were extremely good: she could see the expressions on people’s faces as they wandered in, looking for their seats, seeing friends, laughing and talking … It was her father! Her father? It was! He had just bought a programme, had said something to the girl selling them, which made her smile, and then he had moved forward, put his arm round a lady who stood waiting for him. She wore a black dress, very bare – Louise could see the cleft between her breasts, and then her father’s hand, which closed for a moment upon one of them. The lady said something, smiling, and he bent his head and kissed her quickly on her cheek. Then they moved down the gangway of the dress circle and went to seats in the third row. Everything blurred and she looked quickly away. There was a cold feeling at the back of her neck, and for a second she thought she was going to faint, but she must not. The desire to turn back and look again – it couldn’t be her father – collided with a terror of his seeing her. It was him. She remembered her mother on the telephone: ‘Daddy’s away, he never seems to get any leave …’ How could she prevent him from seeing her? People always looked at the people in boxes. At least he hadn’t got opera glasses and he never used the ones you had to pay for because he said they were useless. She moved her head slowly back to look at them. Stella had taken the glasses, but she could see their heads bent together over the programme. She put her hand half over her face and turned towards the stage. In the interval she could say she wanted Peter to have a turn in front and she would be safe – or safer. But until then, she must just sit very still, with her hand over the left side of her face, and behave as though nothing was happening. Because the other hazard, she realised, was not letting the Roses know that anything was wrong …
‘You’re shivering. Are you cold?’ Stella was asking.
‘A bit. Could I borrow a wrap?’
Peter handed her his mother’s shawl, which she pulled round her although she felt hot. ‘Actually, I’m just longing for the play to start,’ she said.
‘Your wish is granted,’ Mrs Rose murmured as the house lights began to dim.
The rest of the evening was like a frightful dream, only it seemed far longer than any dream. She tried, during the first act, to pay attention to the play, but the knowledge that he was in the same theatre watching the same thing beside the unknown lady with whom, she felt, he must be in love (otherwise why would he lie to her mother about not getting leave?) was too suddenly shocking to be put aside for anything else at all. In the first interval, it was proposed that they should stretch their legs, but realising that this might mean going to the dress circle bar, where she knew that they might be, she refused, saying that she wanted to read her programme. They left her, and she sat miserably in the back of the box discarding wild notions of escape. She had no money with her, so she could not leave a note and simply take a cab back to the Roses’ flat. Aunt Anna might not have any money to pay the cab; she might not even be there. She could not tell them that she felt ill, as that would mean at least one of them taking her home, and she could not face spoiling the evening with a lie. She could not tell them anything at all. Her head ached, and she wanted to go to the lavatory, but not knowing where it was, and fear of encountering him on his way back from the bar made her stay where she was.
This was a mistake; throughout the second act, her need became so urgent that she could not think of anything else, but they had insisted on her remaining in the front of the box, and she was afraid of the commotion she would cause by getting up and leaving which would entail Mr Rose and Peter getting up to move their chairs for her to open the door to the box. At the second interval, she knew she had to risk it and Stella said she would come too. There was a queue for the ladies’.
‘A marvellous moment, when she comes down the stairs dressed in Rebecca’s dress,’ Stella was saying. That wicked Mrs Danvers is jolly good too, don’t you think? Louise? What’s up?’
‘Nothing. I just desperately need—’ She pointed at the lavatory door.
‘Oh. I say, would you mind, awfully, but my friend’s feeling ill. I think she’s going to be sick.’ The slightly resentful faces changed to a real fear, and Louise was allowed the next lavatory that was free. She remained there for some time because, with the eventual relief, she started silently crying. She found her tiny, inadequate handkerchief and mopped up the tears, and tried to blow her nose on some lavatory paper which was not of a kind to be much use for that.
When she came out, she found herself face to face with the unknown lady. For a fraction of a second they stared at one another: she had eyes the colour of blue hyacinths, and a small white lock that sprang surprisingly from the dark ram’s horns into which her hair was fashionably set. Then the woman smiled – her lipstick was cyclamen on a long thin mouth – and pushed gently past her into the lavatory. The woman could not have recognised her, surely, but Louise had felt a flicker of – surprise? interest? come and go in those amazing eyes. Stella came out of the other lavatory, and Louise set about repairing her face.
‘Better?’
‘Much.’ She did not want to talk to Stella until they were outside. Now she was afraid of finding her father lurking somewhere in the passage. ‘You go first. I won’t be a minute.’ And because the cloakroom was so full of more people queuing, Stella complied.
Louise came out and looked in both directions, but he did not seem to be there. Stella was waiting for her. ‘You were brilliant at getting me to the top of the queue,’ she said.
‘Wasn’t I? I was waiting for you to make sick noises to back me up, but you didn’t.’
This time she managed to insist on Peter having her seat in the front and Mrs Rose gave her an approving smile for her unselfishness, which it wasn’t at all, she thought miserably.
And then, at the end of the play, she became terrified of meeting them outside the theatre where everybody would be trying to get cabs. Luckily the blackout helped all that; it was almost impossible to see anyone enough to identify them. But then she began to worry about the Savoy. Her father often went there after a theatre, she knew, because her mother enjoyed dancing. But she found that she could not bear to think about her mother, being lied to, believing him – or perhaps she didn’t? Perhaps she knew and was unhappy, and that was what made her so difficult to get on with? She could not deal with thinking about it in front of all these people.
By the time they got to their table at the Savoy, and she had looked round the very full room and decided that they were not there, she thought she would feel better. She must pull herself together, put on a show of enjoying herself: anyone who knew about acting should know that that was possible. So she began chattering, and drank the glass of wine that was given her far too fast without thinking, but then she found she really did not want to eat anything. She settled for some cold chicken, as being the easiest thing to eat, and was teased by them for such a dull English choice. Once or twice during the evening she caught Mr Rose’s eye upon her, a shrewd, appraising look that seemed momentarily to nullify her appearance of enjoying herself, but she persisted: if she smiled enough she could not be confro
nted. When she had left nearly all her chicken, she was offered an ice and managed to eat it. At last, the bill was paid, a taxi procured and they were trundling back through the dark streets.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a wonderful time.’
‘No, no,’ Mr Rose answered, but whether he meant that she need not thank him, or that he knew it had not been wonderful, she did not know.
It wasn’t until they were going back to school on the train that Stella tackled her.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing’s up, Stella, honestly.’
‘Oh, well, if you’re just going to tell me lies, I’ll certainly shut up. And if you really don’t want to tell me, that’s all right too. I’ll mind, of course, because I thought we told each other everything, but I would stop asking you. Well?’
‘Something is. I can’t tell you. I do partly want to,’ she added, ‘but it feels sort of disloyal.’
Stella was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘OK. If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help.’
‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’
‘My parents were awfully worried about you. They really liked you. You’re the first person I’ve brought home whom they’ve liked. Which is a good thing, otherwise they’d make a frightful fuss about my coming to stay with you in the holidays. I so long to see your house in the country and that great family clan.’
‘How do you know your parents were worried about me?’
‘They said so, of course. Anyhow, it was obvious, wasn’t it? Even Peter knew something was wrong and he’s not known for his perspicacity.’
‘Oh.’ It was disheartening to think that her acting had been such a failure.
‘My mother just thought that you were taken ill, or getting the curse or something, but my father said nonsense – you had had some kind of shock.’ The grey-green eyes were observing her intently.
Louise took refuge in anger. ‘I’ve said I don’t want to talk about it! Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!’
That evening, she asked permission to ring up her mother in London.
‘Darling! Are you all right? Is anything the matter?’
‘Nothing. I just wondered how your weekend with Grania had gone.’
‘It was rather awful, really. She didn’t want to leave Aunt Jessica who was absolutely exhausted. She’d taken to getting up in the middle of the night and waking Jessica for breakfast. And then, when we finally got her packed and into the car, she thought she was going home. And at Tunbridge Wells she wouldn’t get out of the car for ages. I practically had to trick her – say we were just going to have tea with some people. So leaving her there was ghastly.’ Her voice tailed off, and Louise realised that she was trying not to cry.
‘Oh, Mummy darling, how awful! I am so sorry.’
‘It is very sweet of you to ring. They say she’ll settle down – that people always do.’
‘And what about you?’
‘Oh, I’m all right. I came back and had a lovely extravagant bath – not one of the Duchy’s four-inch jobs, and now I’ve had an enormous gin and I’m going to boil myself an egg. Did you have a nice weekend with your friend?’
‘Lovely. We went to a concert – and to a play.’ There was a pause, and then she said as casually as possible, ‘Have you heard from Dad?’
‘Not a word. They seem to work him dreadfully hard. He said that as he’s head of the defence, he can hardly ever leave the aerodrome. Still, it’s what he wants to do – the next best thing to joining the Navy like Uncle Rupe.’
‘I see.’
‘You must stop talking to me now, darling, or we’ll all go broke. But thank you for ringing me up. It was most thoughtful.’
No, she didn’t know. But whether this made things better or worse Louise could not imagine. All the usual emotions that she had about her mother had somehow got overrun by feeling terribly sorry for her. If her father was in the grip of some uncontrollable passion – which he jolly well ought not to be at his age – he might do anything! He might even divorce her mother and go off with that woman. She tried to think of anyone she knew of who had ever been divorced and eventually remembered Mummy’s friend, Hermione Knebworth. Her divorce had been so unusual, and apparently so frightful, that people never talked about it; she had only been able to gather that Mummy didn’t think it had been at all Hermione’s fault. But Mummy wasn’t like Hermione. She didn’t have a dress shop, manage to be awfully good at business and also go about looking so glamorous all the time. If Dad divorced her – left her – she’d have absolutely nothing to worry about or do. And she was obviously far too old to start having a career. She suddenly saw her mother becoming like Grania after her husband died – just sitting in a huge armchair refusing to enjoy anything and saying she wished she was dead. It would be all his fault. It was his fault already. She remembered Aunt Rach saying that people of her age started noticing that their parents were not just parents but people, and people were clearly far more nerve-racking than parents. Parents were simply people whom one reacted to, one didn’t have to do anything about them: they were just – there. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t make one miserable sometimes, but whatever they did, one wasn’t responsible for them. I don’t want to be responsible for my father: I hate him, she thought. Whenever she went back in her mind to that first sight of them in the theatre, she saw her father’s hand closing for a moment round the woman’s breast and was overwhelmed by the sick feeling of recognition of other things, other times, that she did not want ever to think about. And she knew that however much she tried to push it all down and out of sight or knowledge, that in fact she had hated him for ages, ever since that evening when poor Mummy had had her teeth out and she had been alone with him and he had felt her breasts. Mostly, she had avoided him; when he was there, she never met his eye; she snubbed any compliment; snapped at him, ignored him – or rather, tried to give the appearance of ignoring him; actually she was always horribly aware of his presence. Many of the rows with her mother had been about how rude she was to him – like that awful evening when they’d taken her out to see Ridgway’s Late Joys, the wonderful Victorian music-hall show with Leonard Sachs being a witty and urbane chairman, and a strange young man called Peter Ustinov who was an opera singer explaining about a hitherto undiscovered fragment of a Schubert song ‘Ziss Poor Creature is Very Fond of Nymphs’ and then suddenly breaking into the three bars of the fragment. That had all been lovely and they had laughed a great deal. But then they had gone to the Gargoyle Club, and her father had asked her to dance and she had refused, had said that she didn’t like dancing and was never going to. Her father had been hurt, and her mother furious with her. In the end, they had danced, and she had sat and watched them miserably – she would have danced with anyone else in the world but him. The evening had been spoiled after that.
During the rest of that term, while she learned to make choux pastry, to bone a chicken, to clarify a clear soup, to interview a parlourmaid, while she and Stella read books, and she rehearsed her piece for her audition, and they washed each other’s hair and invented a lot of silly jokes that made them almost speechless with laughter, and Stella told her many things about inflation in Germany and how unfair the treaty of Versailles had been, and why it was no good being a pacifist once you’d actually got a war (‘It’s preventive, you see,’ she said, ‘like alternative medicine; once someone’s actually been shot in the leg, you have to get the bullet out,’) until Louise was dizzy with trying to follow the agility of her analogies – while, or in between these activities and this friendship, she reverted to what she called to herself the horrible secret, and had fantasies, daydreams of putting everything to rights. She would go to the woman and tell her that he was married and therefore could never marry her, that he was a liar and liars told lies to everyone so she would be the next victim. She would go to her father and tell him that she would tell her mother all about it unless he promised to give the woman up (thes
e, with variations, were the main themes) – and then the best daydream of all, her parents coming to her with their arms round each other, smiling, happy, saying that they owed their happiness entirely to her – how could they ever thank her? – she was the most wonderful and mature child that anyone could ever have: her mother saying that she was also beautiful; her father saying what courage and understanding she had … These daydreams were like stale and stolen chocolates: afterwards she always felt faintly ashamed and sick.
All the same, by the time that last term was over, she had somehow become used to the situation, and the prospect of having Stella to stay at Home Place, and her audition at the acting school – now only three weeks away – went some way to making her feel that life was not too bad on the whole.
CLARY
May – June, 1940
‘She is rather remote, if not actually sulky, but I expect it is largely sexual frustration,’ she wrote, and then looked at the fresh page adorned by this smooth and worldly sentence with satisfaction. She had come upon this phrase in a book and had been longing to use it. During the winter and ever in search of new subject matter, she had decided to write about all the things that she noticed people never talked about. She had made a list. Sex. Going to the lavatory. Menstruation. Blood generally. Death. Having babies. Being sick. Personal shortcomings that didn’t sound romantic such as sulking, rather than being hot-tempered. Admitting to being frightened of things. Adultery, divorce – although it was going to be a bit difficult to write about them without any first-hand information. Still, quite a lot of good novels told you a bit about adultery. The after-life, or whether there was any. Jews and why people were against them. What was horrible about being a child (they only produced quaint or funny stories about their extreme youth). The possibility of losing the war and being slaves for the Germans. And so on. She kept the list and added to it from time to time but, disappointingly, it had not suggested a plot to her, and as Miss Milliment had rather unfairly stepped up the amount of homework that she and Polly were supposed to do – and given them quite arduous holiday tasks as well – she decided to write small portraits of anyone she knew who came to mind, just to keep her hand in. This one was about Zoë, who these days was pretty boring and therefore, from the literary point of view, something of a challenge. In the autumn, she had just come out of her gloom about the baby dying, and got pregnant again, and looked very pretty indeed, and then, when Dad said the Navy had accepted him and he was going off to a place called King Alfred’s to be trained, all hell broke loose. She cried for days. Apparently, and according to Dad who got awfully upset by it, she had thought that men were not called up if their wives were pregnant. Or they needn’t be, but where she had got this idea from, no one knew. It was daft. Even she – Clary – could see that the things had no bearing upon one another, but then Zoë had childish views – she was rather like an old sort of worn out child, Clary realised, and quickly put that down.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 65