‘What makes you say that?’
‘I’ve been that sort of person. It makes you feel rotten in the end. You know. Like being loved just because you’ve got a lot of money.’
He thought about it. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘that’s how it starts, isn’t it? You like the look of someone.’
‘And then you like other things about them. If there are things to like.’
‘A lot of men are after Ruth, though,’ he said. ‘She loves a good time – dancing and that. She’s only eighteen – much younger than me.’ After that, Zoë spent at least as much time talking to him as reading aloud, which she recognised had been more a way of her dealing with their mutual shyness and embarrassment than anything else …
Juliet was finished. She had fallen asleep on the second breast: it seemed a shame to wake her, but she had to be winded and then held over her pot, but as Ellen was not there she decided to spare Juliet the pot.
Outside, she could hear car doors slamming, and went to see who had arrived. Two cars, one with Villy and one with her sister. Since going down to Mill Farm she had been getting on better with Villy, but Sybil was really her favourite, and she thought then, that when she came home, she would help look after her. There was a knock on the door, and Clary came in to borrow a skirt.
‘The thing is I seem to have got ink on that dress you made me. My beastly fountain pen which has leaked.’
‘I’ll just put Juliet down.’
‘Why don’t you call her Jules? You know – like Juliet’s nurse. “Thou wilt fall backwards when thou hast more wit”, although why falling back should be witty I can’t think. I think Jules is a lovely name. Jules,’ she said lovingly, bending over the cot. The baby opened her eyes and gave her a fleeting smile. ‘You see? She likes it. Where did you get that sweet little monkey?’
‘One of the patients at Mill Farm got a nurse to buy it and gave it to me for her.’
‘Gosh! He must love you. Look at your monkey, Jules!’
‘She’s nearly asleep, Clary – better leave her. Let’s see what I can find you.’
Clary had grown a great deal in the last year and had pitifully few clothes. I ought to do what Sybil did for Polly, she thought, as she rummaged through her wardrobe. Meanwhile, she had several things she could no longer get into – her waist was a good two inches larger. She pulled out a dark grey hopsack skirt cut in six gores that had used to fit round her hips like a glove.
‘Try that on.’
Clary got out of her shorts – they were torn, Zoë’ noticed, were pinned together at the waist with a safety pin – and stood in her faded yellow Aertex shirt and dark blue knickers. ‘Better take my sandals off,’ she said. ‘One of them’s got a bit of tar on it that won’t come off except onto things.’
The skirt fitted her perfectly, although it was rather long. ‘I’ll take up the hem for you,’ she said, but Clary cried, ‘Oh no! I like it long.’
‘You need a nice shirt to go with it.’
‘This’ll do, won’t it?’
‘I don’t want it just to do, Clary, I want you to look beautiful.’
And Clary smiled, but she answered, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather an uphill wish.’
However, by the time Zoë had found a scarlet shirt, and brushed Clary’s hair and held it back from her forehead with two combs – she was still growing out her fringe – she really looked striking, ‘like a photograph of a grown-up,’ she said, unexpectedly and unusually delighted with her appearance.
‘My shoes won’t fit you. What have you got?’
‘Only sandshoes, and lace-ups and these sandals. And wellingtons, of course. Couldn’t I just be in bare feet – like a romantic oil painting?’
‘You know the Duchy wouldn’t let you. It’ll have to be your sandals. But I promise you we’ll go shopping soon and get you some nice shoes. Look – you’d better have these skirts as well. They’re exactly the same pattern and I can’t get into any of them.’
‘But you will when you’ve stopped feeding Jules, won’t you? You’ll get thin again all over, won’t you? I really think you should, Zoë. Thinness suited you. You could do what Aunt Villy calls banting whatever that may mean.’
‘I don’t know if I want to bother. Why does it matter to you, anyway?’
‘It doesn’t exactly matter to me,’ Clary began, and then stopped: they had reached that brink beyond which Rupert lay dead – or alive – and both retreated from it.
‘Polly plucked my eyebrows,’ Clary said quickly. ‘It hurt awfully, I must say.’
When Clary had gone, having gathered up her old and new clothes, thanking her more effusively than suited her natural manner, Zoë looked critically at herself in the mirror for the first time since Juliet’s birth. She had clearly, as her mother would have said, ‘let herself go’. Not only her waist and hips had spread, but her stomach, she could feel it with her hands, was still like chamois leather. She stepped nearer the mirror to examine her face. She still had her creamy skin, but the lower half had filled out so that she could see – almost – the beginnings of a double chin. She was twenty-five, an age that, until she reached it, had seemed over the top; she must start doing exercises and stop eating snacks between meals. Vivien Leigh, Roddy had said, but Zoë wore clothes that concealed her shape, and, anyway, she was sure he had meant her face. When he had said that he went dancing with his girl once a week, and how she loved a good time and had a lot of men after her, she had fleetingly remembered how much she had used to love dancing and men wanting her, how it had all seemed like the most delicious game where she chose what happened, she dispensed the favours, she accepted the sexual homage … Until Philip, when it had suddenly stopped being a game at all. And then the baby that was not Rupert’s and had not lived. But even its death had not diminished her guilt, since that fed upon the continuous deception – chiefly with Rupert but also with the whole family – that she was unhappy because their child had died and she was the only one who knew that this was a black lie. And then, last autumn, after the war had begun, when they were in London packing up her mother’s flat in Earl’s Court (she had been invited to lodge with her friend in the Isle of Wight for the duration of the war), she had not wanted Rupert to help her, but he had insisted (‘It’s too much for you on your own’). He had ordered tea chests into which they put the smaller objects that it was thought her mother would want to keep – the furniture was to go into store, and the things to be thrown out or sold were piled on the sitting-room floor. The flat, as places do that have been deserted for some time, had the air of being only one resentful step from actual squalor: the net curtains that hung at all the windows were so dirty that it looked as though there was a fog outside. Rupert tied some of them back to admit more light, but this only disclosed the shabbiness of the fumed oak furniture and pink damask upholstered sofa, the indeterminate, shadowy stains on the pink fitted carpets, the broken elements in the gas fires, the gnarled, discoloured parchment shades to the sconces, the dust that lay evenly on every surface – upon every photograph frame and ornament. She had packed her mother’s clothes into cases that could be dispatched to her while Rupert dealt with the kitchen. He had to keep asking her whether things were to be kept or not – battered old aluminium saucepans, an attenuated set of Susie Cooper china, fish knives with yellowing bone handles, a teapot in the shape of a thatched cottage and an embroidered linen bag that was full of crocheted egg cosies and paper cutlet frills: ‘Extraordinary mixture!’ he had remarked while he was still trying to be cheerful. When he said things like that, she had snubbed him, had defended her mother: there was nowhere for her to keep things – that sort of defence – until he had said, ‘Darling, I’m not getting at your poor mum: I mean – going through anybody’s things must be a bit like this.’
She hadn’t replied. She had not been back to the flat – not once – since the night she had spent in it with Philip, and this had been comparatively easy, since her mother had hardly been there either. It seem
ed now in small and piercing ways to be exactly as she had left it that morning. Even the same small and cracked piece of Morny lavender soap lay in its dusty declivity in the bathroom and the kitchen contained the remains of a packet of coffee that she had used. She had not thought she would return, and coming there with Rupert added another dimension to her discomfort.
‘Poor little Zoë: you had to sleep on this,’ he had said when they arrived and he sat on the sofa to read through the list her mother had sent of the things she wished packed off to her.
For a mad second she imagined herself saying calmly, ‘I was raped on it actually.’ Unable to stay in the room with him, she said that she would pack the clothes, and that he had better do the kitchen. ‘We don’t want to spend all day here.’ She almost snatched the list from him as she added that there was no point in his reading it. In the bedroom, she collapsed on the slippery pink counterpane decorated with machined chain stitch, suffused with guilt and irritation at herself for being horrid to him and for agreeing to let him come to the flat at all. Alone, she felt, she might have gone back over the whole affair one last time, have exorcised or written off the whole Philip episode – might have been able to rationalise her further deception of Rupert (as long as she didn’t tell him, she had to continue lying) as simply evidence of loving him, of not wanting to hurt him. If only she hadn’t been pregnant, had the baby, she thought, she might have been able to confess the rest of it. He would be hurt and angry, but when she told him how desperately sorry she was, she felt he would forgive her. But not the child. After years of refusing to have his child, how could he bear her to have been what must look like wilfully careless that one night? As though she’d wanted this other man’s baby?
‘The jar of flour has got extraordinary little flies in it! Are you all right, darling?’
‘Just trying to think about where to begin. Perfectly all right. Chuck out all the food things.’
It did not take long to pack her mother’s clothes. Moths fluttered out of her grey squirrel coat, which she had had ever since Zoë could remember, but apart from the moths it was terribly worn – it had better go.
It would be nice to give her a new one, she thought, but she had no money excepting what Rupert gave her and Neville’s school fees had more or less eaten up the small difference in salary that working for the firm had made (the Brig did not believe in paying his sons a penny more than they were worth, and Rupert would be paid even less in the Navy).
When she had finished in the bedroom, she found Rupert in the sitting room looking at an old photograph album that had been lying on the desk.
‘Couldn’t we keep this?’ he said. ‘It’s almost entirely pictures of you from birth upwards. I could write to your mother and ask if I might have it?’
‘You’ve got pictures of me: Mummy gave you some.’
‘Not these. I should hate these to get lost’
‘I should have thought from today that you could see that Mummy didn’t throw things away much.’
The rest of the time in the flat had been like that: she had been filthy to him – everything that he had done or said provoked her; and everything that she found there seemed to compound her guilt, which by then had extended to her mother. Her mother’s diary, an expensive and belyingly gay scarlet leather one that was almost blank, ‘get hair done’ would be the only entry for a week; or, ‘take winter coat to cleaners’. Regularly, every month there was ‘bridge with Blenkinsops (here)’ or, on alternate months ‘(with them)’. Hardly anything else. The loneliness shrieked at her. And the possessions! The sitting room was full of objects that succeeded in being unnecessary and undesirable – the kind of things that would be given by someone who neither knew well nor cared for the recipient: things made of pottery, raffia, sealing wax, dolls dressed in ethnic costumes, fans, wax flowers and endless photograph frames, made of silver, leather, brass, shells, passe-partout and practically every one except for two of her father contained pictures of herself. In the bottom drawer of the rickety little bureau, she came across a box that was full of her baby and childhood clothes. It was ridiculous that her mother had kept them all these years. She said something of the kind to Rupert and then immediately wished she had not, because of course she knew very well why they had been kept. But Rupert only said, ‘It’s because she loves you, darling.’ He was kneeling on the floor wrapping the frames in newspaper and putting them into a tea chest. He had stopped commenting on the photographs, and sounded weary.
When they had finished, he said that they were going to a pub – he needed a drink.
The pub had only just opened and was almost empty. ‘Gin and It?’
She nodded.
It was one of those cavernous pubs with a lot of mahogany panelling and frosted glass, a coal fire and all the chairs covered with mock red leather. She chose a table in a corner, and waited, feeling dirty and dispirited, for her drink.
‘He let me have a packet of fags.’ He put the glasses on the table. ‘I got us doubles.’
‘I was wondering’, he said when he had lit a Goldflake from the packet of ten, ‘whether you’d like to have your mother to stay for a bit at Home Place. I’m sure the Duchy would make room for her …’ He looked at her face and then added, ‘Or you could go to the Isle of Wight for a week or two, if you like.’
‘She wouldn’t want to come to Sussex, and I can’t stay with her – her friend wouldn’t want me.’
‘You don’t want to see her?’
‘It isn’t that.’
‘But you feel so guilty about her, Zoë. Don’t you want to do something about it?’
‘I don’t! I don’t feel guilty. I do feel sorry for her.’
‘That’s not much use to her though, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t realise, until today, how much her life is bound up in you. Suppose I should have – you are her only child. And you’ve been grumpy and defensive all day, so I know damn well you feel guilty.’
There was an angry silence. Then he reached out and took one of her resisting hands. ‘Darling. It’s not wicked to feel guilt, it’s just sad and useless. I found that out when Isobel died. The only thing that stops it is admitting to yourself what you can’t do, and doing what you can.’
She stared at him frightened: he had almost never spoken of Isobel since before their marriage.
‘What could you do about her? After she was dead?’
‘Look after our children, for her as well as for myself. You know about that. You’ve started to do it with Clary.’
‘She started it,’ she said, her voice uneven.
He gave her hand a small squeeze, and put it back on the table.
‘You connived,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get us another drink.’
Watching him walk away from her to the bar she was suddenly flooded with every ingredient of love, some familiar, some quite new to her: she felt tender, fortunate, and unworthy, and filled with a longing to do anything to make him happy.
They went back to Hugh’s house where they were staying the night, had dinner with Hugh at Ciccio’s in Church Street. (Rupert had said earlier that he hoped she wouldn’t mind as Hugh had to spend so many evenings by himself, and she had minded when he said it – had taken it as a slight – but by the time it happened she didn’t mind at all and in fact it was a lovely evening.)
‘If you two want to go to dance somewhere, don’t mind me. I’m ready for bed,’ Hugh had said when they had finished their coffee and Strega. Rupert had looked at her, and she realised how often he had let her choose, and started to blush as she said she didn’t mind which they did. So they all went home, and that was when Juliet began. She had conceived her for Rupert – had had no idea of the intense joy their child would bring her. But he had been away when she was born … might never know anything about her.
Sitting in the chair by Juliet’s cot and remembering all this, she began to acknowledge his absence, began to mourn it for the first time – t
o allow the terrible fever of hope that it was only absence to infect her as she wept and begged silently for his life.
‘Bet you didn’t know that, Miss Milliment.’
‘Indeed no. I had always thought plane trees occurred in this country far later than Chaucer.’
She had been reading over the Brig’s latest chapter of his book about trees in Britain, a task she had taken over from Rachel who had had to go to London for the weekend.
‘Most people seem to think that they were brought here about the time of the East India Company. Utterly wrong, as you can see.’
‘John Evelyn has rather a good account of Xerxes and a plane tree.’
‘Does he now? Amazing feller. Find it and read it to me, would you?’
Miss Milliment obediently hoisted herself to her feet and pattered over to the large glass-fronted bookcase. Finding a book in it was a great trial to her, as the bookcase stood in a dark corner of the study, and the books were not arranged in apparent order. Rachel, of course, would have known where it was. She hunted, but she could only read the spines of the books by taking each one out. ‘I’m afraid I may be some time finding it,’ she said apologetically, but the Brig did not seem to notice: he was in full spate about the tremendous size of plane trees he had known at Mottisfont, some rectory in Sussex, and the avenue at Cowdray Park, and at the same time feeling for his whisky decanter with purple gnarled old hands … ‘Find me a glass, would you, Miss Milliment?’
She stopped looking for the book and searched for one of his immensely heavy cut-glass tumblers. The room was so full of furniture, papers and books that her passage through it was difficult.
“There’s that piece of Pliny’s somewhere, about eighteen fellers eating inside a hollow tree. Just read that to me, would you? It might be suitable.’
Pliny she could find, because he was lying on the desk, but finding the piece that he wanted was another matter. Fortunately for her, a car arrived which the Brig identified as belonging to Hugh: she was asked to find another glass, the monologue on the girth of plane trees ceased, and he became fidgety in his desire to hail Hugh at exactly the right moment so as to entrap him. ‘Is that you, Hugh? Hugh? Is that you? Ah! The very feller I wanted to see. Have a drink, old boy. Thanks, Miss Milliment. She’s been reading to me because Rachel went to London to sort the books at Chester Terrace. Should do the same with my cellar. Do you remember when you came on leave and all I’d got was three bottles of what I thought was undrinkable claret? Bought it for one and nine a bottle in an auction – twelve cases: I’d taken to giving it as wedding presents it was so bloody awful – and we got those three bottles up and they were absolutely superb! Remember that?’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 78