The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  ‘You really think it’s that? You can’t wear that cardigan with that dress, Clary, it looks awful.’

  ‘Does it? I’ll have to – my other one’s dirty.’

  ‘You can borrow my pink.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s funny how I’ve got no taste in clothes.’ She started to laugh. ‘If I really was just a fairly clever toy, you could dress me in a little felt suit all sewn onto me and I’d never have to change.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ Polly answered, ‘because I’d be a toy too.’ The exchange left her feeling both comforted and misunderstood.

  In the end, the famous weekend with Castles and Clutterworths was postponed. Everybody seemed to produce a different reason for this: Aunt Villy, who was palpably cross, said that there had been a muddle about dates; the Duchy said that Mrs Clutterworth was not well; Christopher said that his mother had told him that his father had made a scene in which he had refused to come and refused to be left alone at home. He had added that he was jolly glad they hadn’t come, as he knew that his father would only have another go at him about what he was going to contribute to the war effort. He and Polly had become friends again, which was a relief to her although she still felt wary and no longer liked confiding in him to the extent that she had earlier wanted to do. She saw less of him as he worked all the mornings in the garden, and, as the dog fights continued above them, spent many afternoons watching for parachutes and bicycling off to rescue the airmen – none ever fell so near them as that first time. The Home Guard, as Colonel Forbes’s and Brigadier Anderson’s posse were now called, said he was a splendid chap – pity he was too young to join them. Christopher said they made him feel awful, as they all openly envied his youth and imminent chance to die for his country and he said he was too cowardly and bored by them to admit his true allegiance.

  ‘Do you think part of believing something is that you should tell everybody?’ he asked her one hot August evening.

  ‘Not if you haven’t the slightest chance of converting them,’ Clary, who had overheard, chipped in before Polly could answer. This made Polly say that she didn’t know how one could be sure that one wouldn’t.

  Christopher said that there wasn’t an earthly chance of changing Brigadier Anderson’s mind about anything: ‘He’s one of those people who always thinks and always says and always does the same things,’ he said.

  ‘It would drive me insane if I was his wife,’ Clary said. ‘Do you think that was what Mr Rochester was like? I’ve never felt that the first Mrs Rochester’s madness was properly accounted for.’

  ‘There you go,’ Christopher said at once. ‘“Never” and “always” come to much the same thing.’

  Clary shot him a half admiring, half resentful glance.

  ‘I’ve never known a mad person,’ Polly said pacifically.

  ‘Yes, you have. Poor old Lady Rydal.’

  She didn’t want to pursue that. Clary had given her such a graphic description of her visit and, although Aunt Villy, when asked by the Duchy how her mother was, had recently said that she seemed much calmer and slept a good deal, she still dreaded the possibility of Lady Rydal getting the amount better that would mean she lived at Pear Tree Cottage and would have to be seen, and might at any moment go completely mad again. I could never be a nurse, Polly frequently thought. I’d be too sorry for the ill people to be any use. But she did not say this to anyone, since her two serious conversations – with Dad and with Miss Milliment – had both resulted in them suggesting that this could be a career for her. It was true to say that this had not been Miss Milliment’s first choice. ‘I have always rather wondered’, she said in her gentle, tentative voice, ‘whether perhaps you and Clary might not benefit from university. It is the time when one can absorb most and I should like to think of you being exposed to really good minds, first-class teaching and the opportunity to meet many different kinds of people.’ She looked enquiringly at Polly. ‘It would mean, of course, that you would both have to work very hard to prepare, as you would need to pass your school certificate and also your matriculation exams before you could apply. I had been meaning to suggest this little plan to Clary’s father and your parents but circumstances have made that either difficult or impossible in dear Clary’s case. But a university education could do so much to widen the possibilities of a useful and interesting career.’ She peered at Polly through her tiny, thick steel-rimmed spectacles. I do not sense very much enthusiasm,’ she said, ‘but I should so much like you to think about it. In the case of Clary, I feel it would provide her with a goal, which at the moment could be most helpful to her. But perhaps you have set your heart upon an art school.’

  ‘Oh no, Miss Milliment. I know that I couldn’t be a painter. I’m just a kind of decorator really, and I really don’t want to be anything more.’ She noticed that Miss Milliment’s long and distinctly odd piece of knitting had dropped from one knee and that stitches were slipping surreptitiously off the needle.

  Miss Milliment clutched at the needle, but since she had her foot on the very end – or beginning – of her work, this simply precipitated all the remaining stitches into sly, diminishing loops. ‘I think you are treading on it, Miss Milliment. Would you like me to pick up the stitches for you?’

  ‘Thank you, Polly, I should. Although I have thought that it will require a second sort of courage for one of our brave soldiers to wear a muffler made by me. I seem quite unable to preserve the same number of stitches from row to row.’

  ‘What I really wanted to know is what I should do with my life, I mean,’ Polly said some time later when she had tactfully unravelled enough of the muffler to get rid of the worst holes.

  ‘I understand that. But there’s time before you need make up your mind. And in the meantime, it is a good thing to consider how you may best prepare yourself.’

  ‘I expect I’ll have to do something about the war.’

  Miss Milliment sighed. ‘That is quite likely. I have always thought that you would make an excellent nurse, whereas I can see Clary joining some women’s service as I think the adventure would appeal to her.’

  ‘I’d be a hopeless nurse! I couldn’t be objective enough! I’d be sorry for all the wounded people instead of helping them!’

  ‘My dear Polly, I did not say that you are a nurse, I meant that you could become one. In any case, you will not be old enough to train for three years. But, of course, you would not be able to go to university for three years either. But it is possible that if you were a student any war service might be deferred until you had obtained your degree. I think perhaps we might discuss this with your father?’

  But when Polly talked to him, he said that he didn’t see any point in her going to university. ‘A blue-stocking daughter!’ he exclaimed. ‘Quite soon I shouldn’t know what to talk to you about. I’d far rather keep you safe at home.’ Which was relieving, though not in the least helpful.

  ‘I should think it would be quite exciting,’ Clary remarked about the university idea.

  ‘Well, Miss Milliment thought you ought to go too.’

  ‘Did she? Has she got sick of teaching us, I wonder?’

  ‘It can’t be that, because she said we’d have to work extra hard for years and years.’

  ‘Oh. Why don’t you want to go, Polly?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think I’m worth it,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, I think it must be mostly for men and then a few fearfully clever girls. I think it would just make me feel inferior.’

  ‘Oh, Poll! Anything makes you feel that. These days.’

  ‘What do you mean “these days”?’

  ‘Oh! You know what I mean. These days. These awful, bright frightening going-on days—’

  ‘Monotonous, you mean—’

  ‘Yes! You know, terrible things are happening every day – and then you have to go on getting up, cleaning your teeth, nothing happening to you – just brink after brink. It takes such ages to get grown up and do what you like. And then, t
here are all the things you don’t know …’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh! All the things they don’t tell us.’ Her voice took on a savage mimicry. ‘“Because we’re not old enough.” I’m old enough to know Dad is missing. That makes me feel old enough for anything.’ She was crying now, but she took no notice of it. ‘Zoë thinks he’s dead, you know,’ she said. ‘She has completely given up. You can tell that, because she doesn’t care about her appearance any more. And everybody else has stopped talking about him. When something is really worrying, you’d think people would talk about it more, but not our family – they’re just a crowd of ostriches.’

  ‘You can talk about him with me.’

  But truthfully she dreaded it. Clary had made a map of the north coast of France, starting at St Valéry where her father was known to have gone ashore and continuing west through Normandy and Brittany and round the corner until the Bay of Biscay. This she had pinned to one of the old cork bathroom mats and on it she marked the progress she imagined her father making, outlined – and more – by her in a serial told to Polly at night. Her experience of France was limited to The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities and an historical novel by Conan Doyle called The Huguenots. The Germans had become the Republicans, and the French, to a man or woman, the loyal underground that would assist an aristocrat to join his family in England. Uncle Rupe was being passed along the coast by these brave and loyal people. He had many narrow escapes but, in the end, that is what they always were, and occasionally he got holed up in some village for a week or two. This was happening more and more frequently, and Polly sensed that Clary did not want to get her father right to the west coast as then he would actually have to be got home. It was true that his French was very good as he had studied and painted in France before his first marriage, so he could pass as French easily, Clary thought. He had been planning to get a fishing boat to the Channel Islands but the Germans, of course, got there before him. He had been nearly burned to death in a barn where they had hidden him, had toiled for two days on an ancient bicycle with strings of onions on it (she had seen this in London), had been taken in a cart for a whole day hidden under sacks of fish manure (‘They’re all farmers and fishermen so they’d be bound to use old fishbones and heads and things like that’) so that he smelled too awful for his hosts that evening and they took all his clothes to wash while he had supper wrapped in a blanket. Of course his uniform had gone long ago: he’d bought a complete outfit of French clothes with his gold watch. Sometimes he lived off the land: eating apples from orchards (Polly forebore saying that they wouldn’t be ripe), and even stealing eggs from hens’ nests. ‘And he could milk the odd cow!’ Polly had once enthusiastically exclaimed, but Clary immediately said that he had never liked milk. Kind people often gave him reviving swigs of brandy which they always seemed to have about them, and Gauloises which luckily were his favourite cigarette. He had got very ill swimming across the Seine at night where it was pretty wide, but a kind old woman – a shepherdess – had nursed him back to health; she had told Uncle Rupe that she was so rude to the Germans that they dreaded coming to inspect her farm.

  Polly listened two or three nights a week to this saga of triumphant adventure – the outcome of which was not in question, according to the storyteller – but in which, although she was frequently caught up in the tales told, she could never believe. Privately, she thought as the rest of the family, that Rupert was dead, for if he had been taken prisoner – a notion only the Duchy was known to cling to – why had they not been told?

  Even the news that four hundred were feared dead when a French ship was torpedoed in the Channel did not have the effect upon Clary that Polly both dreaded and yet felt would be better for her. ‘It just shows that there are French ships about,’ she said, ‘and one day Dad will be on one of them. Perfectly logical,’ she added, ignoring the possibility that he might have been on that one.

  The days crawled by. The dog fights continued, and now Teddy and Simon were back from school and rushed about the countryside on their bicycles hoping to capture Germans. When this was discovered, they were forbidden, but Teddy got round it by haunting the Home Guard headquarters where Colonel Forbes, who thoroughly approved of his attitude, gave him harmless and strenuous jobs to do. Simon, who was now as tall as his mother and very spotty, was excluded from this on account of his age, which hurt his feelings – much more, Polly knew, than he let on – and worse, left him at an unbearably loose end. Dad cleverly solved this by providing him with an extremely dilapidated wireless set about which he said, ‘The moment you have got it working again, it shall be yours.’ So in the end, he was all right, Polly thought rather resentfully. Where, metaphorically speaking, was her wireless set? Lydia and Neville, who were getting on better again, were patients for Aunt Villy’s first aid classes that she ran twice a week. They lay on trestle tables while anxious careful ladies from the village wound yards of crêpe bandage round assorted limbs. When they weren’t doing that, they played for hours in what was called the very, very old car – one of the Brig’s earliest vehicles that had been moved out of the garage when the Babies’ Hotel had been evacuated and had sat ever since in a field beyond the orchard, where it was sinking slowly and majestically into the ground. All things that she would have enjoyed once, she thought sadly: she seemed either too old or too young for practically everything.

  In August, her mother took her to London for the day to buy clothes for the winter as she had outgrown nearly everything from the previous year. Aunt Villy came with them as she was going to a National Gallery concert where the man who hadn’t come for the weekend was playing. In the train Aunt Villy and Mummy took the corner seats facing the way they were going, so she sat opposite and pretended she didn’t know them – had never seen them before. Aunt Villy looked quite smart in a grey flannel suit with a navy blue crêpe-de-Chine blouse, silk stockings and navy blue court shoes: her gloves and handbag all matched this outfit and her hat, perched on her wavy grey hair, had a white petersham ribbon bow at the back. She had makeup on as well: rouge on her cheekbones and rather dark cyclamen lipstick that made her mouth look a bit cruel. All the same, looking at her, you could see a bit what she must have looked like when she was young and had things in her life that excited her.

  Mummy, on the other hand, wore no make-up and her gingery ash-coloured hair was in a straggly bun, with bits escaping and hairpins sticking out like the ends of paper clips. Her face was pale except for the small flurry of freckles on her nose and forehead, and already, from just standing on the sunny platform, shiny with perspiration. She wore a dress of green and black and white flowers and a cream linen coat that looked too large for her: it was already crumpled. Her stockings were too peachy; she had black shoes and white cotton gloves, which she was taking off as she settled in her seat. Her hands, white and smooth with small fingers adorned by her emerald engagement ring beside the gold one, were the smartest thing about her, Polly thought sadly. It was difficult to imagine how she had been when she was young; she looked now as though she had been born readymade middle-aged and had already been that for far too long. She was smiling at Aunt Villy now, fanning herself with a glove, saying yes, do open a window. The smile went out as suddenly as the sun from a swift cloud, leaving a kind of wan, but anxious neutrality behind.

  ‘Galeries Lafayette do have some nice things for young people,’ Aunt Villy was saying. ‘In fact, you could probably do everything in Regent Street, and then you’ll be handy for the Café Royal and lunch with Hugh.’

  ‘Oh, can’t we go to Peter Jones?’ Polly wanted to get her clothes at the same place as Louise, who said it was by far the best shop.

  ‘No, darling, it’s too much off the beaten track. I want to go to Liberty’s anyway to get material for Wills as well as you.’

  She subsided. It was supposed to be an outing for her, and she wasn’t even allowed to choose where they would go. She wanted linen trousers like Louise had, but Mummy didn’t appr
ove of girls wearing trousers unless they were skiing or something.

  At Robertsbridge a lot of people got on the train and by Tunbridge Wells it was absolutely full. An air-raid warning sounded there, but people went on reading their papers or staring out of the window without taking much notice. Then they heard planes right over their heads, and suddenly one seemed to be right on top of them and there was a burst of gunfire. A man next to Polly put his hand on her head and forced it down below the window. ‘Machine-guns – what will they do next?’ he said in tones of mild wonder.

  But other people all looked out of the window and somebody said, ‘They’ve got him!’ and there was a sound of cheering all through the train. Polly straightened, cross to have missed seeing the plane shot down, and then amazed at herself for wanting to.

  Mummy smiled at the man and told her to thank him. ‘Thank you,’ she said and glared. He gave her a humiliatingly comprehending smile and returned to his crossword.

  Charing Cross station seemed to be full of men in uniform with huge canvas kitbags waiting for trains. Their necks looked raw from the chafing of their rough bomber jackets; their black boots were enormous.

  Her mother wanted to walk up Regent Street, but Aunt Villy said that there was no point in her getting tired out before she’d started, and that they would all take a taxi, she’d drop them at Liberty’s and take it on to her dentist.

  The taxi was one of the very old yellow ones, with creaking seats and an ancient driver who took them slowly round Trafalgar Square and the huge buildings with sandbags piled against their windows round Piccadilly Circus, past Swan and Edgar, outside which people waited to meet somebody else, past Gaieties Lafayette and Robinson and Cleaver – where Mummy said she ought to get more table napkins for the Duchy, and Hamley’s – a shop all children were supposed to adore, but Polly had never cared for: toys, she thought, as they passed, had always seemed a dull substitute for the real thing – and finally, Liberty’s, which looked like a gigantic Tudor house.