The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Love and hugs from Clary.

  Now, what shall I do? she thought. She decided on a prowl about to see if she could find anyone doing something that she would want to do with them. It was pretty hopeless. Aunt Rach – the best bet – was in London with the Brig and wouldn’t be back until six. She could do her homework – an essay on Queen Elizabeth’s attitude towards religious toleration plus some algebra which she simply loathed – or she could do her weeding stint for the week – two hours spent however the Duchy or McAlpine dictated – or go to Watlington with Polly to get more khaki wool for the mufflers they were knitting (everybody was knitting; Zoë for her baby who now had millions too many clothes, Clary thought, and even Miss Milliment was struggling with a scarf but she was simply hopeless, it was full of holes from dropped stitches and not even straight at the sides, but she didn’t seem to notice).

  The prowl didn’t yield much. Zoë was lying down, Ellen was ironing, the Duchy was in the greenhouse potting up tomato plants, and Wren was on a ladder outside whitewashing the panes in the roof and making the whistling sound between his teeth as though he was grooming a horse. You couldn’t do anything with him: he talked all the time until anyone was there when he stopped saying a single word. The panes were all streaky because it wasn’t his job. She wandered to the kitchen as lunch – macaroni cheese and stewed prunes – had been ages ago and she was hungry. Tonbridge was in the pantry, cleaning out a decanter with shot and Mrs Cripps seemed to be helping him. A plate of flapjacks lay on the draining board looking completely delicious. She asked if she could possibly have one. Mrs Cripps pushed the plate towards her and then told her to run along. She went and sat on the stairs in the hall to eat it – very slowly – as though it would be her last meal on earth. War is boring, she thought, even Polly must be getting bored with it, which reminded her that she hadn’t seen Polly since lunch.

  In the end, she found her in the day nursery playing with Wills, patiently building card houses which he knocked down with one careless swipe. The nursery had their old gramophone in it and it was playing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Lydia, who was holding Roland under his arms in an effort to make him stand, said ‘Look at Roly walking!’ while his legs, clad in knitted boots, helplessly brushed the ground and he smiled with benign appreciation at every card crash. One side of his face was tomato-coloured, the other pale rose, and a heavy swag of dribble swung to and fro as he turned his head. Clary watched hopelessly. Soon Zoë would have one of these and she would be expected to love it.

  ‘It’s extraordinary how awful and unattractive they are,’ she said to Polly after they had managed to escape on the lying grounds that they had to do something for the Duchy. Lydia, who had wanted to come with them as usual, had been placated by Ellen who promised to let her push the pram.

  ‘I mean, puppies, and kittens, and foals, and even new little birds don’t look so disgusting. I don’t know why people have to start so fat and swampy. If I had one, I’d want to send it to kennels or a hospital or something until it got human. And they really only seem to like smashing things up, so it isn’t even as though they have nice natures.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to have one. You can simply not marry.’

  ‘I could marry if I liked, and just not have one.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ Polly answered consideringly. ‘I suspect there’s some kind of trap there. It’s all or nothing,’

  ‘Bet you’re wrong. Look at Mrs Cripps.’

  ‘The chances are she isn’t Mrs Cripps. Cooks are often called Mrs just to please them. Also, we don’t absolutely know she hasn’t had children.’

  Clary was silenced. They were walking up the fields to the shop at Watlington so that Clary could buy a stamp for her letter.

  ‘I think’, Polly said, ‘that people often get more boring as they grow older. I agree that human natures are inferior at any age. I mean even man-eating tigers only do it because their poor teeth have given out or they have rheumatism and people are easier to catch. But Wills is very sweet. If he could build the card houses, that’s what he’d be doing. As it is, he can only knock them down. I think it’s a bit critical of you to be so against people.’

  ‘I’m not – at all! You shouldn’t say that! It’s only babies I don’t like.’

  ‘You didn’t want Lydia coming on our walk, and if I’d asked you why you would have said she was boring.’

  ‘I should,’ Clary replied, ‘because she would have been!’ She burst into tears. Either she was having to look after people, or she was being criticised, she sobbed. Nobody ever said she was sweet when she was a baby, they were all too busy telling her to make allowances for Neville because of his asthma. Ellen had frankly told her that she preferred boys. And Zoë had come and taken up so much of Dad’s time that she felt she was just an appendage. And now, with him away for goodness knew how long, she was supposed to look after Zoë and Neville, neither of whom was in the least grateful. Neville had said that a boy at school had told him that there was a society for getting rid of girls or women except a few to be housemaids, like worker bees, and even though she could see that it would take them years as there were so many of them, it showed you how against they were. She’d spent her whole life without a single person on her side …

  ‘I’m on your side,’ Polly said. They had stopped walking and Clary was sitting on the ground with her arms hunched round her knees. Polly knelt down beside her. ‘You’re my best friend,’ she said. ‘It’s quite equal – we rely on each other. I’m sorry I criticised you.’

  ‘Did you mean it?’

  Polly hesitated. ‘Yes, I did,’ she said. ‘But I know you have awfully high standards. I don’t think most people could live up to them. All the time. In the same way, you can be critical and I still love you. I can’t help noticing it, but it doesn’t change my serious feelings.’ She looked at Clary’s anxious face and felt a surge of love for her. ‘I really revere your honesty,’ she said.

  They got to their feet and finished the last field of Home Place land, climbed the gate onto the road at the top of the hill to walk the last quarter of a mile to the shop. Its front garden was full of aubrietia and yellow tulips and forget-me-not and two bushes of mauve lilac with the scent of pale honey, but inside it smelled as usual of tarred twine and bacon and oiled wool and Wright’s Coal Tar soap. Mr Cramp stopped cutting coupons out of a ration book and went behind the counter at the post office end to serve Clary with her stamp, and Mrs Cramp finished measuring three yards of elastic before finding the wool for Polly.

  ‘And how is Mrs Hugh keeping?’ she asked Polly, as she detached two skeins from an enormous hank.

  ‘She’s very tired. She has something wrong with her back.’

  ‘Like Miss Rachel. Those things runs in families,’ Mrs Cramp replied comfortably as though two bad backs were more comforting than one.

  ‘Have you heard from Peter?’ Clary heard Polly asking politely. Peter was Mrs Cramp’s son who’d worked in the local garage, but was now in the RAF.

  ‘You could say we have and we haven’t. He’s not given to writing – well, he’s never had any call for it – but he did give us a ring on the telephone two Sundays back – or was it three? Alfie! Was it the Sunday before last that Peter rang on the telephone or was it the Sunday before that?’ But Mr Cramp couldn’t rightly remember which it was.

  ‘Heard from your dad, have you?’ he enquired of Clary, and when she had said that she had, Mrs Cramp, lowering her voice to fit the subject, enquired after Mrs Rupert. Clary said fine, she was having the baby next month. ‘Of course, she misses my father,’ she added loyally.

  Mrs Cramp looked gratified. ‘She would do. Stands to reason. That’ll be three and threepence for the wool, Miss.’ She had put it into a weak paper bag, where, as there was not room for it, it seemed to take on a writhing life of its own. Polly paid for it and Mrs Cramp asked if they’d fancy a Chelsea bun. ‘There’ll be no more call for them today, and they won’t be
worth the eating tomorrow,’ she said, as she popped two into another weak paper bag.

  So on the way back, they sat on a bank by the wood and unwound their buns and ate them.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how being in the country isn’t a treat any more.’

  ‘Oh, well. Nothing is, if it goes on long enough.’

  This fired Clary, and she immediately thought of the things she would never get tired of. ‘Being grown-up for one thing.’

  Polly didn’t agree. ‘But you don’t just get grown-up. Almost the moment you’re that, you start getting old.’

  ‘I don’t think people notice that, as it’s happening all the time, and is so slow, I don’t think people realise what’s going on until it’s too late.’

  ‘When they die, you mean? I should think they’d jolly well notice then. Tell me two good things about being grown-up.’

  ‘Going to bed just when you want to instead of when people tell you. Well, actually doing anything because you’ve decided instead of other people. I shan’t ever get tired of any of that.’

  ‘Well, I’m not tired of the country,’ Polly said. ‘When I’m grown-up I shall have a little house with all my things in it and that will be in the country. I shall have a library and a swimming pool and plenty of animals and a wireless by my bed and a separate room to play games in. You can stay with me whenever you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She noticed that Polly didn’t offer to have her to live there and it made her feel ungrateful. ‘If we don’t win the war you won’t be able to.’

  ‘Stupid! Of course I know that. And Dad says that if they don’t get rid of Mr Chamberlain he thinks—’

  ‘We won’t?’

  ‘He didn’t say that. But I know he’s worried. He absolutely hates Mummy being in London and she hates being away from Wills, but she won’t leave him on his own – sometimes I notice them very nearly quarrelling!’

  They got up and started to walk home, and while Clary was noticing how amazing the young oak leaves looked with the sunlight on them, Polly said in a rather shaky voice, ‘Of course, there’s always the possibility that we might get invaded during the week when they weren’t here. I couldn’t hide with Wills because he’d be bound to make a noise, and I don’t see how I could escape to London—’

  ‘Polly! Shut up! I’m not going to let you get into a state about that! You know perfectly well that if they thought that they’d be here – or they’d take you somewhere else. The Hebrides,’ she added rather wildly. ‘Honestly, if Hitler was going to come here, he’d have done it by now. It will probably all happen in France – like the last one. If it happens at all.’

  ‘Yes, they would, wouldn’t they?’ The paper bag burst, and she undid the skeins and hung them round her neck. ‘You’re a great comfort, Clary. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Concealing the intense pleasure that this last remark caused her, Clary finished loftily, ‘Just think of it as a pretending war, Poll – very boring, but nothing to worry about.’

  That afternoon – the rest of that unremarkable day – was the last of its kind, she thought, although she didn’t start to think it until the weekend, when the news said that Mr Churchill was now Prime Minister. Everyone seemed very pleased, and she could see, from the photograph in The Times next morning, that he had a more optimistic face than poor droopy old Chamberlain. The event was discussed at lessons the following Monday, and Miss Milliment explained about coalition governments and said that this meant that all the best people would be governing the country. She then suggested (but really told) her and Polly that they should start writing a journal of what was happening. It would help them to understand things, she said, and would be very interesting to read when they were older, ‘Or even for your children,’ she added. Lydia instantly said that she wanted to do it too, and before she or Polly could snub her, Miss Milliment said, of course, everybody should do it. Miss Milliment had an awful cold and kept blowing her nose on the same rather grey, sopping handkerchief that really only seemed to make her face damper, and Polly said that she thought Miss Milliment probably couldn’t afford enough handkerchiefs. ‘She hasn’t had any new clothes since she came,’ she said, ‘excepting the cardigan Mummy bought her for Christmas.’

  They thought about this. Then Polly said, ‘Couldn’t you give her some of your dad’s?’

  ‘I don’t much want to.’

  ‘Well, we can’t afford to buy her any – they cost about threepence each. If you give people handkerchiefs, you have to give them at least six.’

  In the end, they decided to apply to Aunt Rach, who always seemed to think of the right thing to do. ‘Are we going to put this in our journals?’ Polly asked.

  ‘Good Lord no. It’s far too … parochial. You couldn’t call Miss Milliment’s cold a world event.’

  She spent the afternoon wrestling with The Times and writing about people like Lord Halifax and Mr Attlee and someone with a lovely name, Lord Beaverbrook. They were to read the first bits of their journals later in the week.

  Lydia hadn’t got the hang of it at all.

  This morning I got up and put on my blue dress, but I couldn’t find a blue hair ribbon to go with it. Breakfast was horrible with soggy tomatoes and one piece of bacon with an enormous band of fat. Ellen in a temper again because she’d been up all night with Roly who is teething. I can’t see what use one single tooth will be to him, but I suppose he has to make a start somewhere. There was a dear little rabbit on the lawn but it annoyed the Duchy. Aunt Sybil is staying down this week as she doesn’t feel well. I wish Mummy was not so well and stayed too. Neville was horrid at the weekend as usual: he has gone to the dogs in my view and looks like staying there. He threw fir cones down on me from a tree. I nearly cried and he said I was, which I wasn’t. I hate him, but I don’t wish he was actually dead as that would be wrong.

  And so on.

  She and Polly sat rolling their eyes with contempt and putting their hands over their mouths to stop them laughing aloud, but Miss Milliment said – you could hardly believe it – that Lydia had done very well. When everybody had read their bit, she talked for quite a long time about journals, and explained that they should not only contain events, but what the writer thought and felt about them, which made her see that hers – and Polly’s – was actually rather dull. But it was annoying that Lydia seemed to have got it righter than they had when she was so much younger. ‘A fluke,’ she said to Polly, but Polly simply said think how nice it was for Lydia to be the best at something for once, and she felt humbled by Polly’s niceness.

  That week, Clary wrote her journal every day.

  Tuesday 14 May. On the news this evening, it said that Queen Wilhelmina had arrived as an exile from Holland which the Germans have reached. I suppose she’s lucky to be able to leave, but all the same it must be awful for her. Miss Milliment said that the Dutch might open the dykes and flood everything which would make it impossible for the Germans to capture the country, but there was nothing about this on the news. Perhaps they left it till too late, but Polly said it was probably more like car accidents – people always think it won’t happen to them – so perhaps the Dutch thought the Germans wouldn’t invade them at all. The Allies are going to join up with Belgium to stop the Germans which is more than poor Queen Wilhelmina had, so perhaps that will give them (the Germans) a nasty surprise. The thing is, it still all seems very unreal; life goes on just as though none of it was happening. We had horrible cauliflower cheese for lunch today and in spite of the Duchy saying how delicious and nourishing it was I noticed that Aunt Sybil didn’t eat any of hers. She seems to get bad indigestion a lot of the time as well as her back, but Aunt Rach says it is because she worries so frightfully about Uncle Hugh, even though he rings up every night, which poor Dad can’t do being in a ship. We aren’t supposed to know where he is, but when Zoë showed Uncle Hugh one of his letters about coming back to that wonderful London air which Zoë couldn’t understand, Uncle Hugh sai
d he thought he was in the North Atlantic and going into Londonderry to get fuel and food and all the things they have to have. Zoë eats all the time – the Duchy makes her drink milk, and she gets extra eggs and the Brig gives her all his sweet ration, which personally I think is deeply unfair. She is much fatter than usual I don’t mean just her stomach which is vast, I mean all over, but she still stays madly glamorous. I’ve given up her portrait. I think it is impossible to write about a person at all well if you don’t find them fascinating. Zoë is the kind of person that I would quite like to have a portrait – I mean a painting – of, rather than have her about in real life …

  It was at this point that she began not to want to show her journal to the others. This was another thing about journals: if they were private, you somehow had more chance to make them interesting. But she didn’t really want Miss Milliment to have the slightest idea of her feelings – or the lack of them – for Zoë. In the end, she kept two: the public one to be read at lessons, and the serious private one that she read to herself – and quite often to Polly, who didn’t seem to have that problem at all. ‘I can’t think of enough to say about people,’ she said, ‘and everyone has their good side.’ Polly put drawings in her journal – they weren’t particularly apposite, as she pointed out to her, just anything that came into her head – at the moment the journal was full of moles because she’d found a dead one on the tennis-court lawn and learned how to draw it until it began to smell awful and she buried it. Polly’s moles were rather good: they had the sort of expression that made you think they thought it was quite all right to be blind. Miss Milliment admired them very much and found her a book illustrated by Archibald Thorburn which the Brig had in his study. But he mostly painted birds and Polly wasn’t so interested in them.