‘Look after Zoë for me,’ he had said the night before he went, which really was a funny way round. After all, who was the stepmother? But she couldn’t imagine him saying, ‘Look after Clary for me.’ She rather doubted whether Zoë had ever been asked to look after anybody. It might be a good idea to give her an only medium-demanding animal like a rabbit for her next birthday to get her started on looking after something – or else her baby was in for a rather rotten time. (Of course, it was Ellen who really looked after all of them.) At Sports Day at his school, Neville had even pretended he hardly knew her. ‘You’ve hurt her feelings, you fool,’ Clary had hissed at Neville when they were meant to be getting plates of strawberries for the grown-ups in the tea tent. ‘Well, she hurt mine wearing that silly fur fox round her neck. If you ask me, that’s what feelings are for,’ he added while he skilfully transferred some better strawberries to the plate he had chosen. He had grown a lot, but his front teeth looked far too large for him and he had spent a lot of the Christmas holidays up trees that Lydia was afraid to climb. He didn’t seem to make any great friends at his school and he loathed games. His asthma was much better, but the night before Dad went, he quarrelled with everyone, drank what Emily said was the best part of her bottle of cooking sherry, unpacked his father’s suitcase, threw everything into the bath and turned on both taps. Dad found him and they had a sort of fight but in the end he was crying so much that Dad just carried him off to his room and they spent a long time alone together. He had asthma all that night, and Ellen stayed up with him because Dad had to be with Zoë because she was so upset. ‘Look after Nev, won’t you,’ he’d said to Clary next morning. ‘He kept saying last night that now he’d have nobody, and I kept telling him he had you.’ He’d looked so grey and tired, that she couldn’t say how much she minded his going, couldn’t say, ‘And who do you think I’ll have?’ or anything selfish like that because she could see that some kinds of love simply wore him out, so she just made her face smile and say, ‘Yes, I will.’ He smiled back at her and said, ‘That’s my Clary,’ and asked her to come to the station with him. ‘Zoë doesn’t feel up to it,’ he said. Neville had gone to school as usual, and Tonbridge had driven them to Battle: she’d waited on the platform with Dad with nothing left to say and the train coming in was a relief. ‘Don’t wear any of those wet vests,’ she’d said as the most grown-up thing she could think of, at the end. ‘No, no. I’ll make His Majesty dry them for me personally,’ he’d said, bent to kiss her and got onto the train. He waved until he was out of sight and she’d walked slowly back to the car where Tonbridge was waiting, and got into the back and sat stiffly upright. Once, she saw Tonbridge looking at her in the driving mirror, and in Battle he stopped and went into a shop and came out with a bar of milk chocolate which he gave her, and although she loathed milk chocolate, this was a considerable kindness. She started to thank him and then had to pretend that she had a bad cough. He drove her back to Home Place without talking, but when she got out of the car, he said, ‘You’re a little soldier, you are,’ and smiled, so that she could see his black tooth next to his gold one.
Well – back to Zoë. She’d gone upstairs and Zoë was lying on the bed that still had Dad’s pyjamas on it and Ellen was standing with a tray saying she’d feel better if she ate something, think of the baby. But that seemed to make Zoë cry more than ever.
Description of Zoë lying in bed. Dark silky hair, all tangled but somehow looking better than when she’s done it; very white skin that has a kind of thick pearliness about it (creamy? satiny?); no colour in her cheeks, just a slightly darker cream; sooty eyelashes that look as though they have mascara on them even when they haven’t; wide-apart eyes, not emerald – more like grass … well, exactly like Polly’s last but one cat. Rather a short upper lip and then a longish mouth that turns up at the corners when she smiles, which makes a dimple in her left-hand cheek. What a horrible word dimple was. Shirley Temple has a dimple. If she was actually describing a heroine in a story, she’d never give them a dimple, but there it was, Zoë had one and this was meant to be a portrait. She couldn’t write much about the rest of her because it had been under the bedclothes except for one arm that was just really a boring white arm with tremendously carefully manicured nails painted a shiny pale pink. This was being a failure. She suspected that one would need to be in love with Zoë to be interested in her appearance, and if one was in love with someone, how much did it matter what they looked like? She supposed that liking the looks of someone would be what made one get to know them better. The only person who’d ever seemed to like the look of her was Dad, that day when they’d been filling the bottles with spring water and he’d said she was beautiful – well, he’d said he was surrounded by beautiful women and she’d been one of them. The trouble about writing anything was that it made one think of something else. She felt she was a bottomless pit of memories, and she was only fifteen. What on earth must it be like when you reached the Duchy’s age? You’d hardly be able to think at all for them; it would be like having so much furniture in a room that there was nowhere left to move.
Anyway, that day she’d sat on the side of the bed and tried to cheer Zoë up, saying all the things that he’d said about only being at King Alfred’s for a matter of weeks, and then probably getting leave, and not being in the slightest danger, which nobody was as far as she could see, anyway, in the whole war, except in places like Finland and now Norway, although she knew that Polly did not agree with her at all about this. Then she had had to go and do lessons with Poll and Miss Milliment, and, extremely boringly, Lydia, because now that Neville had been sent to the prep school near Sedlescombe, they said Lydia couldn’t do lessons by herself. She still had to do them partly by herself, because being merely nine, naturally Lydia couldn’t understand most of what she and Polly did, but Miss Milliment was very patient and clever about dividing her time between them. The Babies’ Hotel had gone back to London and they’d still been living in Pear Tree Cottage then, as the boys were home from school, but when term started, they’d all gone back to Home Place. Miss Milliment slept in the cottage over the garage and they had lessons in the little ground-floor sitting room. Mill Farm was let as a convalescent home for people – it had been meant for wounded soldiers only there weren’t any, so it took people recovering from operations and things like that. In the weekdays Aunt Sybil and Aunt Villy went to London and Wills and Roland were left with Ellen. At the weekends Uncle Hugh came down with Aunt Sybil, but Aunt Villy came on her own – she didn’t always come and Lydia minded. Sometimes they were taken to London to go to the dentist, or get clothes. Dad’s house in London was shut up, so when she went it was with the others: she no longer had a London home, but she’d got all her valuable things, her books and the scrapbook with pictures of her mother when she was a child and a postcard from Cassis in France that her mother had written to her before she was even old enough to read – ‘Darling Clary, Here is a picture of the place where Daddy and I are staying. We live in the little pink house on the right. Love from Mummy.’ The house was marked with a cross in faded ink – for years afterwards she had lived on that love sent. Well, she was used to it now – to not having a mother – and Neville had always been used to it. But it made Dad pretty important to her. She’d had a good cry with Polly after lessons in the potting shed. Polly was awfully good to cry with because she cried as well, though not so much.
Dad had come back for a week at Christmas, but Uncle Edward only got two days. Louise went and spent a week with Nora and her mother at Frensham, but she said she was glad to be home when she got back. The house was full of musicians, she said, and that made Uncle Raymond very sarcastic and Nora was going to work in Aunt Rach’s Babies’ Hotel until she was eighteen and could start training to be a nurse. Nora had come back to Home Place for a few nights with Louise, and Clary had overheard them having a most interesting conversation about Aunt Jessica and somebody called either Laurence or Lorenzo who was one of the musicians. Louise see
med to think that Aunt Jessica was in love with him, which Nora said was ridiculous.
‘Villy, however, is clearly infatuated.’
This was so fascinating, that Clary got into a more comfortable listening position and really paid attention.
‘Infatuated? With Laurence? How could she be? It’s out of the question!’
‘Why on earth?’
There was a pause, and then Louise said distantly, ‘He’s got greasy hair and enormous blackheads on his nose.’
‘That wouldn’t matter. He simply oozes charm.’ She said it as though charm was the worst thing you could ooze with. ‘Naturally, he doesn’t attract me in the least.’
‘But he’s married as well as them.’
‘I don’t think that makes the slightest difference to that sort of man. Villy was always asking him to give her a piano lesson.’
‘And Jessica was always getting him to play the accompaniments to Grandfa’s songs – the ones she could sing, I mean.’ Another silence, while Clary thought how grown-up it sounded to use their parents’ Christian names.
‘Perhaps it’s just that they both like music awfully,’ but Louise said this so feebly, that Clary could tell she didn’t mean it.
‘Well, I think you should tackle your mother about it.’
‘Really, Nora, that’s a ghastly idea. There’s nothing to go on, it’s nothing to do with me – and anyway, if that’s how you feel, why don’t you tackle your mother?’
‘A, because it’s your mother that is infatuated, B, because your father is away fighting the war, so it isn’t fair on him, poor thing, and C, things do go on – your mother wore lipstick every day at Frensham, and if you ask me frightfully unsuitable clothes considering there’s a war on, and it was she who thought of calling him Lorenzo which is obviously affected and—’ she paused before what she clearly considered her trump card, ‘it was obvious that his wife hated her even more than Mummy. Wives always know, you know—’
‘Oh, do stop saying everything is obvious! Laurence, or whatever he’s called, is married, Mercedes is a Catholic (she calls him Lorenzo, by the way, so it wasn’t Mummy’s idea) and your mother stopped doing her hair in that funny bun and made masses of puddings with Carnation milk because she knows he loves sweet things. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, so there’s nothing to stop you tackling your mother …’
‘All right, supposing they’re both in love with him. He looks quite foreign and unscrupulous enough to encourage that. Mummy said he was miserable with his wife because she was perpetually jealous of everybody. I’ve noticed they were pretty sharp with each other.’
‘Who?’
‘Jessica and Villy. I bet they’re jealous of each other. I mean really, Louise, you must see that it can lead to no good.’
‘Whatever I can see doesn’t seem to be my business. And it seems to me utterly unfair that just when I’m trying to start my own life, I have to start worrying about them. And in a much worse way,’ she added.
‘How do you mean, worse?’
‘Well, they’ve spent years simply worrying about things like have we cleaned our teeth, or done our homework, or stopped reading in bed when they’ve told us to. Now, according to you, we’ve got to worry about whether our mothers are flirting with someone who’s married. Or worse. In some cases, much worse.’
‘What cases?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You mean like them having an affair? Twerpy Lorenzo kissing them and things like that? You don’t actually mean …’
But here, Nora’s voice was lowered to such an extent that Clary could not hear what she said, and no longer being able to hear made her feel slightly guilty about what she had heard. But if one wanted to be a novelist, it was essential to grasp any opportunity to know what might be going on. Two sisters being in love with the same man was certainly a pretty strong idea, particularly if everyone concerned was already married. What baffled her was the way people’s lives never seemed to reach any conclusion at all: after all, if these aunts, at their advanced stage in life, were going about falling in love with an unsuitable person (and come to that, who could be suitable? It was the general idea that was embarrassing, rather than who they might fall in love with), when could one ever say, well, that person has got their life arranged and all they have to do is go on with it. It made the whole idea of heroines being young and all that rather silly. Supposing her dad fell in love with someone else while he was away? According to all that she had just heard, this was perfectly possible. The next thing she ought to do was to fall in love with someone, so that she would have a better idea of what it felt like. The trouble was that she didn’t meet anyone, and the idea of mooning about being in love with Teddy or Christopher, the only boys remotely old enough, seemed hopeless: she didn’t even like Teddy much, as he talked nowadays about nothing but aeroplanes and different kinds of gun and beating people at games. A much older man might be a better bet. She considered the older men that she knew, but either they were related, which she knew from dogs was bad for breeding, or – Tonbridge, Wren, McAlpine and Mr York each appeared to her – like ‘Wanted’ photographs in a police station – definitely not wanted by her – and that seemed to be that. Perhaps one could practise on a relative. But when she thought about the uncles, apart from them being too ordinary and well known to her for any serious romance, they weren’t about enough any more. Dad was the only one who seemed to her worth it and she needed him as a father. The thought of Dad made her feel instantly homesick for him, and she decided to write to him instead of struggling on with Zoë’s portrait.
Home Place
6 May 1940
Darling Dad [she wrote],
I really hope you are well and enjoying being in a destroyer. Before I tell you anything, I must point out that letters are now one and a half times as expensive as they were when I last wrote, twopence halfpenny in fact, and this brings me to the need to have a bit more pocket money or you will have to have one and a half times fewer letters. Could you make it sixpence a week more bringing it to one and six every Saturday? I quite see that this is probably a detail to you, but my life seems to be composed of them [rather a good sentence, that]. It was awfully sad that you couldn’t come home at all for Easter. Louise brought a friend from school – a fearfully intelligent person called Stella Rose, whose brother is going to be a famous pianist. Her father is a surgeon. Stella played the piano with the Duchy who said she was awfully good. According to Aunt Villy, they are thought to be Jewish, but I asked Louise and she didn’t know and nobody else said anything about it. I hope you are better from being seasick. I do really sympathise with you about that – especially having to work as I can’t do anything if I feel sick, but I suppose you just have to give people orders, you don’t actually have to scrub decks or go up masts or anything like that. That’s one good thing about being an officer even if you are the oldest sublieutenant in the RNVR. [She had got out his last postcard to copy this out, uncertain what it meant.] We had to do a short life of anyone we chose for our holiday task and I chose General Gordon. He was very religious and after a rather victorious time in China he got stuck up the Nile and besieged by enemies and we never sent reinforcements in time so he got murdered. You can see this bit in Madame Tussaud’s, but in spite of such a dramatic end, he didn’t turn out to be as interesting as I’d hoped, and Polly had a much nicer time with Florence Nightingale. Polly is amazingly pretty; her face is thinner and she is growing her hair which is the colour of a very good fox, don’t you think? A pity foxes don’t have blue eyes. She is drawing animals and did a very good fox which is what made me think of that. I have written only one story and half a play but I got stuck. The trouble is that not very much happens here at all, except meals and lessons and people fussing about the blackout and listening to the news, which is rather boring. I don’t want to make any more things up, so I’m waiting for something exciting to happen. Louise is supposed to be not beautiful but striking, which I would perso
nally hate to be. She is quite grown up and going to her acting school this term which has made her rather swanky and distant – her character has definitely gone down hill. [Then she remembered that he would want news of Zoë and Neville.] Neville is quite well and he likes being a weekly boarder so that is all right. He has a horrible friend who wears spectacles and stammers and does everything Neville tells him – called Mervyn, wouldn’t you know? Mervyn does all his maths for him and Neville told the school that he wasn’t allowed to eat cabbage and they believed him! Unbelievably naïve in my view. The worst thing that he did last term was to put a frog down the lav, but I’m glad to say he couldn’t stand the remorse and he told Ellen who told the Duchy and he got punished. What do you think of Modigliani? Miss Milliment told me about him when I was asking her about Jews, because I couldn’t understand how they could be English as well, and she said because they hadn’t got anywhere proper to be of their own they’d had to live in all kinds of countries where they had enriched the culture – like Modigliani. His people are a bit like people in dreams I think. You know – you recognise them, but they’re never anyone you’ve seen before. Do you think being instantly recognisable is a good thing? In painting and writing, I mean – and I suppose music but I’m distinctly unmusical so I don’t care about that so much. But once you’ve seen a Modigliani you’d always recognise another one, wouldn’t you? Well, is that a good thing or not? On the one hand, it might mean that whoever it was was doing the same thing again and again, on the other hand, they might just have made their own private language and the things aren’t the same at all. As you’re a painter, Dad, you should be able to answer that. I miss you [here she paused, and felt the familiar indigestion feeling in her chest] sometimes [she wrote carefully]. Please notice this stamp and remember about the beginning of this letter.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 66