‘Here we are,’ he said. The wood thinned out to single trees and she could see railings on either side of the drive and then the dark mass of the house before them. They had not talked in the car much: she had asked him who would be there, and he had said, just the parents. He stopped the car, and she got out and waited, shivering slightly while he collected her suitcase from the boot.
There were two doors, the second made mostly of glass and then they were in an immense hall, at the end of which was a double staircase rising to a gallery. A very old manservant appeared and said that they would be having tea in the library.
‘Right. This is Miss Cazalet’s case. Get Margaret to take it up, would you?’ He turned to her, untied her headscarf and gave her a reassuring smile, ‘There, my beauty,’ took her hand and led her through a vast oak door, along a passage to another oak door which opened into a square room that seemed to be entirely lined with books, except for the huge stone fireplace, where a log fire burned, on each side and in front of which were three sofas. On one of them lay a fragile-looking woman with white hair who was embroidering something in a round frame.
‘Mummy, this is Louise.’
When Louise got near to take the hand held out to her, she realised that she was not as old as the white hair had made her think from the doorway. She wore a blue Chinese silk padded jacket embroidered with birds and flowers over a long thick white woollen skirt, and silver earrings, which looked like some kind of fish, dangled from her large, but elegant ears.
‘Louise,’ she said. Her eyes were as pale as they were blue and looked now at her with a kind of shrewd brilliance, as though, Louise felt, she was transparent. ‘Welcome, Louise,’ she said, and then, turning to her son, who bent to kiss her, added, ‘You were quite right, Mikey. She is a little beauty,’ but somehow there was a touch of impersonal patronage about the way in which she said it that made Louise feel simply uncomfortable.
‘Where’s the tea?’
‘I rang for it, darling, when I heard your car.’
‘Where’s the Judge?’
‘In his den, as usual, working. Come and sit down, Louise, and tell me about yourself.’
But this invitation increased her unease, and she heard herself being very dull in her answers to the questions put to her while she ate hot scones and bramble jelly and cherry cake.
‘My favourite cake!’ Michael exclaimed when he saw it, and Louise saw a small complacent smile flit for an instant across his mother’s face.
‘Really, darling? How very lucky for you!’
‘Well, you must act for us this evening,’ she added to Louise as she delicately licked bramble jelly off a finger and rubbed it with a large, very fine white handkerchief. God, no! Louise thought.
After tea, Michael got out his Senior Service and offered her one. When she had taken it and he had lit it for her, Lady Zinnia said, ‘You smoke? It used to be fashionable when I was young, but my mother always said that it was common for girls to smoke.’
‘Oh, Mummy, according to you, she thought everything girls did was common. Times have changed. But if you’d rather we didn’t smoke in here—’
‘Darling, I wouldn’t dream of telling you what, or what not, to do. I was only considering that if Louise wishes to become an actress, she should look after her voice …’
At last, Michael said come and see his studio, and took her upstairs and along what seemed like miles of sombre passages to one end of the house where there was a very large room with skylights along one side of the ceiling.
‘Hang on a minute while I do the blackout,’ he said pulling down a series of roller blinds. Then he switched on the lights and the room was blazing. The floors were bare wood, and it smelled pleasantly of paint. He went to open the wood stove at one end, sat her in a large armchair and offered her another cigarette. Then he said: ‘Don’t be overwhelmed by Mummy. She hates people to be afraid of her, but she does rather tease new ones to see if they will be. Stand up to her. She‘ll appreciate that. She has trouble with her heart, and as she’s always been an extremely active person, it is hard for her. And, of course, she worries about me far too much, although naturally she would never say so.’
He seemed to be saying two things at once, Louise thought. She felt it was rather difficult for a stranger to stand up to someone who had a bad heart and was suffering from anxiety. All she said now was, ‘Don’t let her make me act anything. I’d be speechless with terror. Honestly, I can’t think of anything that would frighten me more.’
‘Darling Louise, we shall all be acting this evening: people are coming to dinner, and Mummy loves us to play charades. So it won’t just be you. Although I expect you’ll knock spots off the rest of us – being a pro and all that.’
‘Oh. Are a lot of people coming?’
‘A neighbouring family, the Elmhursts. Now, tell me more about you. I want to know every single thing.’
Because he seemed really interested – not merely curious, as she felt his mother had been – she was able to launch into what he seemed to find an entertaining description of her family: and she found that when she was telling him about the great-aunts, for example, she could imitate them perfectly and make him laugh. She told him about Uncle Rupe, and he said how awful that must be, and then about doing lessons with Polly and Clary, ‘Until, of course, I got too old,’ and then about the cooking school and her great friend Stella and then back to her burning desire to join the student rep in Devon if only her parents would let her. ‘Although I think they want me to learn typing so that I can get some boring war job,’ she finished. ‘But they might let me have this one year.’
‘Until you’re eighteen?’
‘How did you know my age?’
‘I asked Hermione. She said you were just seventeen.’
‘I’m seventeen and a half,’ she said feeling that her actual age was undermining her.
‘You are a remarkable seventeen and a half,’ he said.
She asked to see some of the pictures that were stacked against the walls.
‘You won’t like them. They’re not modern or adventurous or anything. I simply have a kind of deadly facility and most people are reassured by it and pay me lots of money for them.’
The ones of women were all rather like the one she had seen of Hermione: wearing evening dress, and, in many cases, jewels, sitting in large gilded armchairs, or lounging gracefully on sofas – not quite smiling, looking more as though they had been, and got tired of it. She did not know what to say about them. There were two that were different and although they were leaning face outwards against a wall, he did not actually show them to her. One was of a very beautiful girl in riding clothes, and one of a young man in an open-necked blue check shirt – strikingly handsome in a poetic faun-like manner. She was not sure what was different about these pictures, except that, apart from them being idealistically beautiful, the girl looked as though she might also be stupid, and the boy petulant. Brought up by Miss Milliment at least to look at pictures that she considered to be good, but by painters who were, by and large, dead, she realised that she had never looked at contemporary work at all, let alone by someone she knew. Excepting Uncle Rupe, of course, but she realised now that she had taken his painting, like his being her uncle, uncritically and for granted.
‘I didn’t think you’d like them,’ he said. ‘They’re rather cheap and vulgar, aren’t they really – like me.’
‘You don’t really mean that!’
‘But I do. I’m second rate. Mark you, that’s not bad. Most people would be extremely glad to be that.’
‘Aren’t you most people?’
‘Of course not. I’m just as unusual as you are.’
She looked at him to see if he was laughing at her, and was not sure.
‘Darling Louise, I’m not laughing at you – you amaze me too much for that. Knowing Shakespeare practically by heart, and being so brave about bombs – and – oh, I don’t know – everything! I kind of knew – the momen
t I saw you – that you were special, and by golly, you are!’
Before she had to say anything to this, a bell sounded from below, and he got up.
‘Dressing time,’ he said. ‘I’d better show you your room.’
He led her back along the passage, past the head of the staircase to the passage the other side of it.
‘Bathroom’s at the end,’ he said. ‘There’s time for a bath if you want one. I’ll come and fetch you in half an hour.’
During that weekend, he made two drawings of her, took her riding (he turned out to be a brilliant horseman: there was a row of cups he had won for jumping in shows, including ones at Olympia and Richmond), acted in charades with her – he wasn’t particularly good, but he was uninhibited and clearly enjoyed it; played the piano – which he did by ear – and sang songs like ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs Worthington’. Through it all, he never failed to admire almost everything she said and did. On Monday morning, he put her on a train at Pewsey, kissed her face, and asked her to write to him.
‘But what,’ said Stella, the following weekend after she had listened to much of this, ‘was he like?’
‘I’ve told you!’
‘You haven’t at all. You’ve simply told me things you did. You seem so bowled over by the grand house and dressing bells and being unpacked for, that you haven’t noticed anything interesting at all. What does he look like?’
Louise thought for a moment. ‘It’s funny. If I described his appearance you’d just think he was dull, but he isn’t. He has terrific charm.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, light brown hair – not an awful lot of it, as a matter of fact. I should think he’d go bald fairly young. Of course, he’s not young now: he’s thirty-two. Pale blue eyes – sort of greyish blue, but they look very hard at – at everything … Quite a large forehead.’ She stopped there; he had the suspicion of a double chin, and somehow she didn’t want to mention this to Stella. ‘A small nose,’ she added.
‘I can see him as if he was in front of me,’ Stella scoffed;
‘He has a lovely voice. I think that’s possibly the most outstanding thing about him.’
There was a silence. Then Louise said defensively, ‘You think I mind far too much about appearances, don’t you?’
‘No. Everybody ought to mind about what they see. It’s what you see that matters. Tell me about the parents.’
Louise was on her mettle now. She related her first impressions of the fragile creature on the sofa, and how they proved to be more and more wrong during the weekend. ‘She’s actually very powerful, I think. She designs and makes jewellery, but she’s done lots of other things. She used to make pots, and plates, but Michael said since her heart trouble she’d had to stop that. She adores Michael. I had the feeling that he was the most important person in her life …’
‘What about her husband?’
‘She was perfectly nice to him, and he obviously adores her, but he was working most of the weekend: I only saw him at meals. He was extremely kind to me. He’s the sort of person who finds out what you are interested in, and then talks about it, and, of course, he knew all about everything. And it wasn’t just with me. When a whole lot of people came to dinner, he took a lot of trouble about two of the girls who were pretty frightened of Zee.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what she’s called. But all the young men simply loved her: she had them all round her.’
‘It sounds as though she doesn’t like women,’ Stella remarked.
‘Oh. No, no, I don’t think she does.’
‘In which case, watch out.’
‘She asked me to come again.’
‘That’s probably because Michael wants you to. It doesn’t mean she likes you.’
‘I don’t suppose she does.’ She sounded so disconsolate that Stella laughed and threw an arm round her shoulder. ‘Cheer up! None of all that is anything like as important as being a world-famous actress, is it?’
‘Shut up! I’m not even going to be allowed to be that! They’ll make me do some dreary typing job until it’ll be too late! I feel as though I’ve been marking time all my life, and now, just when it might begin, this beastly war will spoil it all.’
‘Most people can’t do what they like in a war.’
‘I bet they do. My father loved organising the defence of an aerodrome. He didn’t at all want to go back to sorting out the mess at our wharves after the bombing. And I bet that there are lots of people who like fighting. I know you think I’m selfish and I agree with you. All I mean is that so are a lot of other people, but it doesn’t show so much because they happen to want to do the things that are popular.’
The more she talked like this, the worse she felt. In a minute, she knew, Stella would point out to her that the thousands of people who’d been bombed out of their homes could hardly be said to be liking it, so she added quickly, ‘Of course I know I’m very lucky compared to most people, but I don’t find that that makes one feel much better, just rather guilty for feeling awful at all.’
‘All right,’ Stella said equably. ‘Let’s go back to Mozart.’
‘Only the slow movement, then. You know I can’t manage the other ones.’
They had spent a morning playing two pianos. Neither of them performed very well, but they enjoyed it. Stella was a better sight reader than Louise, and was prepared to tackle works she had not practised, and Louise had not practised anything for months now, but they forgave each other, stopped and started again until even they got too cold to continue – the log fire in the drawing room smouldered all day and sent its serious heat up the chimney (the Duchy always played in mittens).
Stella loved staying chez Cazalet. She said it was like living in a village instead of a box, which was how she rather unfairly described her parents’ flat. What she really enjoyed was the lack of curiosity displayed by the family about what each other was doing and thinking. There were no cross-examinations, no post-mortems of the kind that she and Peter had to endure about almost everything they could be seen or sometimes imagined to have done. She longed to have a flat of her own and had pointed out to Louise that if she joined her at Pitman’s, they might be allowed to share a place, and might then go on to get jobs in the same institution: the Ministry of Information, the BBC or the like. But Louise clung to the idea of having one year in which to make it as an actress, in the same way that Stella had been implored to do her first year at university which she had refused; she did not want, she had said again and again, to be cut off in that kind of way from what was really going on. I want to be in the war,’ she had said. Her father had finally given in – not because she was right, he had said, but because she had to start learning from her own mistakes. She had told Louise about all this, and Louise had said that all parents were difficult the moment one had a mind of one’s own. ‘Considering what opposite things we want, it’s a pity we can’t swap parents,’ she said, and this had had the unexpected (to her) result of Stella’s eyes filling with tears and being given a hug of unusually emotional proportion. Having Stella to stay was one of the best things in her life, she thought, because, although she had thought she would miss Michael, her time with him had very quickly started to feel unreal so that she could hardly believe her own memory of it.
‘Actually, I went to stay out of pure vanity,’ she confided that night when she and Stella were in their beds.
‘I knew that. It sometimes worries me that you are so unsure of yourself.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you seem to need other people to tell you what you are like.’
‘Do you know what you are like without other people telling you?’
‘I can’t answer that, because in our family everyone talks all the time about the others, admiring, discussing, criticising …’
‘My family criticise me. That’s about all they do do.’
‘You mean your mother. It didn’t look to me as though your father e
ver would.’ She had met him once when he had given them both lunch in his club in London. ‘He obviously adores you. Let’s get back to your vanity,’ she added, when she had got no response.
‘You get back to it if you want,’ Louise said sulkily. ‘All I meant was I went because he was the first person who has really admired me.’
‘What about me? I’ve admired you.’
‘OK. The first man who has ever admired me.’
‘Well, at least you’re honest about it,’ Stella said. ‘Just don’t let it all go too far.’
‘What “all” do you mean?’
‘There are plenty of cases of young women marrying much too young and then getting bored with frightful consequences. Think of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.’
‘Honestly, Stella. A, I’m not thinking of marrying anybody for years and years, and B, Michael is not in the least like Karenin or Monsieur Bovary.’
‘He doesn’t sound much like Heathcliff or Romeo either,’ Stella retorted. ‘In fact, he sounds as though he might turn out to be quite dull.’
It was getting very near to being a quarrel. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ Louise said with offhand dignity. ‘I don’t want to discuss the matter any more.’
The next day, Stella apologised, ‘Not because I think the things I said were wrong, but because I don’t say them in the right way,’ which didn’t feel much like an apology to Louise. All the same, it was duller than ever at Home Place when Stella went, and she was overjoyed when a letter finally arrived addressed to her mother from Mr Mulloney (one of the teachers from the acting school) saying that he had now found a theatre in Devonshire and a large house three miles away where the students could live, and he had also procured a Mrs Noel Carstairs to be Matron of the establishment. Louise was to be offered a scholarship which meant that she would only have to pay two pounds ten a week for her keep. After much persuasion her mother said she might go.
There were a few more minor rows about her packing, as Louise insisted on taking every single garment that she possessed on the grounds that if they did modern plays they would be expected to dress themselves. Polly and Clary were suitably envious. ‘I do hope we will be allowed to come and see you performing,’ Polly said. ‘You are so lucky knowing what you want to do.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 83