The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  ‘Why do you think he ran away?’

  ‘He said he was bored with school, and he didn’t think anyone would mind. Clary was furious with him. Now, what about an ice for your pud?’

  On the way home, he said, ‘You’re not, you know, too taken with that bloke, are you?’

  ‘He’s just a friend. Why?’

  ‘Dunno. You’re still a bit young for that sort of thing.’ He put a hand on her knee and squeezed it. ‘Don’t want to lose you yet.’

  The sirens went just as they got back to the house, which had felt very odd when they’d first gone there: shrouded, quiet, cold, and not very clean. She said she was very tired, and thought she would go straight to bed. All right, he replied, though he seemed disappointed. ‘I’ll just have a nightcap, and then I’ll join you

  What did he mean? she thought, as she undressed as quickly as possible (her room was freezing) and pulled the Viyella nightdress over her head. What did he mean? Then she thought, Don’t be idiotic, he meant he was going to go to bed too. She looked through her old chest of drawers to see if she could find any socks: there were planes overhead and antiaircraft guns began firing. Her drawers were full of old things – clothes she had outgrown, and objects that she no longer liked: a black china dog, and her gymkhana cups, and old, greasy, twisted hair ribbons.

  She did not hear him coming upstairs, because bombs were dropping, and their distant but shattering sound excluded smaller noises. He opened the door without knocking, a glass of whisky in his hand.

  ‘Just came in in case you were frightened,’ he said. ‘Get into bed, you look cold.’

  ‘I’m not frightened in the least.’

  ‘Good for you. Get in, and I’ll tuck you up.’

  He sat on the bed and put his whisky on the table beside it.

  ‘I know you’re growing up,’ he said. ‘I can hardly believe it. It seems only yesterday that you were my little girl. And look at you now!’ He began to pull the sheets round her, and then slipped his hand under them, bending over her as he took hold of her breast. His breath smelled of whisky – a horrible, hot, rubbery smell.

  ‘Very grown up,’ he said and suddenly put his mouth on hers, his tongue, like a horrible hard worm trying to squirm in.

  Terror – like a sudden high tide – travelled up her body at an unearthly speed: if it reached her throat she would be engulfed and paralysed, but she would not be so drowned … The moment she could recognise choice, rage rescued her. She drew up her knees, put her hands on his neck and pushed him, with a jolt away from her. In the sudden second of silence, before either of them could move or speak, a bomb fell very much nearer, the house seemed to shiver, and some glass fell with a seeming reluctance, from her bedroom window.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said: he looked both hurt and bemused.

  She sat up in bed, her arms wrapped round her knees.

  ‘I wouldn’t have hurt you,’ he said. He looked sullenly self-righteous, she thought. But that was not enough.

  ‘I saw you at a theatre,’ she said. ‘You seem to be hooked on people’s breasts, you had your hand on hers. I saw you from a box.’

  His face flushed, and she saw his eyes become hard and wary. ‘You can’t have! It must have been someone else.’

  ‘I had opera glasses. It was you. The lady had dark hair with a white streak in it and violet eyes. I saw her in the ladies’ in the interval afterwards. And, of course, a very low-cut dress,’ she added; the shafts were going home and there could not be too many.

  ‘She’s an old friend,’ he said at last. His flush was subsiding, but his eyes were cold as blue glass.

  ‘Of yours and Mummy’s?’

  ‘Mummy has met her – yes.’

  ‘But she doesn’t know that you go to the theatre with her – or anything else? She doesn’t know about the weekends?’

  That went home. Now he looked really stricken. ‘How on earth—’ he began, and then changed his tune. ‘Darling, you’re not old enough to understand—’

  ‘Stop treating me like a child when it suits you – and like a – like a tart when it doesn’t! I hate you! You’re horrible – and you—’ Her voice broke and now she was furious with herself for wanting to cry so badly.

  ‘You tell lies,’ she finished inaudibly.

  ‘Listen, Louise. I do occasionally, but that’s only because I don’t want to hurt Mummy’s feelings. And you don’t want to either, do you? Telling her any of that would only make her awfully unhappy. I can’t explain why things are as they are – you’ll just have to trust me.’ He saw her face, and said, ‘I mean, you’ll just have to accept that.’

  There was a silence during which two more, more distant, bombs fell.

  ‘I really only came in because I thought you might be frightened of the raid,’ he said. ‘I was going to tell you that we could go to an air-raid shelter if you liked. I’m sorry that – that I got carried away. It won’t happen again.’ He picked up his glass and finished the whisky.

  ‘No,’ she said: she longed for him to go away.

  He got up and stood with the empty glass in his hand staring at the blacked-out window. ‘Well – your bed’s not near the glass, anyway,’ he said. When she looked up from staring at the bedclothes round her knees, he was gazing at her, uncertain – abject.

  ‘I’ll say good night then,’ he said, awkwardly. He walked to the door as though his legs were stiff. ‘I’ll knock on your door at half past seven in case you’re not awake.’

  ‘All right.’ It felt as though saying that sealed some tacit, uneasy pact.

  She waited, rigid, until she heard his door shut and then put her face into her hands to weep. It should have felt like a victory – a triumph – but all it felt like was a dead loss.

  At the station in the morning, after he had tipped the porter to find her a good seat, had bought her The Times and Lilliput and Country Life to read in the train, had found the guard and asked him to look after her and given her a pound to have lunch, he stood for a moment in the compartment. Discomfort had settled like scum between them: he said he thought he’d better get onto the platform. He gave her shoulder a little pat, then a quick clumsy kiss on the top of her head. When he reappeared at her window which was half open, he said, ‘I think I’d better be off.’ Then, suddenly with his left hand, he wrote with his finger on the grimy glass: ‘Sorry, do love you. Darling!’ in his best looking-glass writing – one of his tricks when she’d been a child was to take two pens and write in different directions – one looking-glass, one straight. He turned to her when he’d done it, tried to wink, and a tear fell out of that eye. Then he raised his hand in a salute and walked away without looking back.

  CLARY

  Winter – Spring, 1941

  28 March. It was Polly’s birthday yesterday and rather a flop, but as I pointed out, sixteen is better than fifteen – at least it’s another year of this awful in-between no man’s land that we both feel we are in. Polly says that the war makes it worse, and I started by disagreeing with her, but when I think about – well – everything, Dad and everything, I have to agree with her. My point really is that it would have been a no man’s land anyway and, as I told Polly, you can perfectly well have two reasons for something when one would have been quite enough. Uncle Edward says that morale is high, but that doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what happens. Miss Milliment disagreed with me about this, and when I said look at the Charge of the Light Brigade, she immediately pointed out that however mad and silly it was to make the charge, it did succeed in spiking the Russian batteries. My morale isn’t high, but that’s another thing you can’t mention unless it is. Anyway – Polly’s birthday: Mrs Cripps made her a cake – coffee which is my favourite, but she likes lemon and you can’t get them and Zoë made her a lovely bright blue jumper, and Lydia gave her a lavender bag she made, but she used last year’s lavender so it is rather prickly and doesn’t smell much. She got a pound from the Brig, and the Duchy gave her a little silver chain, and
Miss Milliment gave her Great Expectations and I gave her an amazing glass case full of huge unlikely butterflies – extremely rare and valuable I should think – for her house – I got it in Hastings. Aunt Syb and Uncle Hugh gave her a silver wristwatch with her initials on the back. Neville tried to give her that wretched white mouse he ran away with – at least, he said it wasn’t the same mouse, it was one of its children. Mice have gone out of fashion at his school so he didn’t have to pay for it or anything. I call that a really thoughtless present and I told him. So he let it out in the garden and gave her the magnifying glass that Dad gave him for a birthday once, and I told him she would treasure it because of Dad but he said it was him she should treasure it because of. I am quoting Neville here, naturally, I know that one does not end a sentence with a preposition if one can possibly help it. Still, it was ultimately kind of Neville. Aunt Villy gave her a beautiful handbag of real leather and Louise sent her a book of poetry called New Verse which I honestly don’t think she’ll read because she said I could borrow it for as long as I liked. I think mine was the best present. Bully and Cracks – or perhaps in a journal I should say the great – aunts – gave her an evening purse made of brown and gold beads which I cannot see her ever using in a war, and a nightdress case embroidered with hollyhocks by them. She is hoping it will get worn out before she gets her house because it won’t go with anything else, it is so horrible. Wills gave her a bunch of colt’s foot daisies and two stones. My present cost five bob but of course I didn’t tell her; it’s easily the most expensive present I’ve ever given. After supper we played Head, Body and Legs, and Consequences. Head, Body and Legs reminds me awfully of Dad because he drew such lovely funny ones and it must have reminded the others but nobody said anything. They’ve stopped talking about him and now I have too because when I do they get all kind and embarrassed and it only makes me know that they think he is dead. But I think now that he may well be not trying to get home because he is working as a spy against the Germans in France. I told Polly this, and she said it sounded like a possible idea. Then I told the Duchy after we’d played the ninth symphony – the one with voices – and she said she thought I might be right but I wasn’t sure if she really believed me, but when I’d put the records away she said, ‘Come here, my treasure,’ and gave me a terrific hug and I said, ‘Don’t you believe me?’ and she said, I believe that you believe it and I can’t tell you how much I admire you for it.’ I must say that was rather pridening.

  Teddy was very excited because there’s been a big naval battle in the Mediterranean and we sank seven Italian warships and most of the Italians lost their lives. He is rather a bloodthirsty boy and can’t wait to be eighteen and fighting the war.

  What are my views on war by now after a year and a half of it? I feel divided between wanting to be against the whole thing, and feeling that if there has to be a war, women should be allowed to fight as well as men – I mean really fight, not just be secretarial or domestic in uniform. After all, women are getting killed by bombing when they can’t retaliate at all, so it’s no use men saying any more that war is men’s business. But on the third hand (if you can have one), there are some things in a war that I should absolutely hate to do, like be in a submarine, or stick bayonets into people – although Polly says she thinks there is less of that nowadays. And I wouldn’t at all like to be in a tank. Polly says that this is like the submarine and connected to claustrophobia, but I’ve never shown any signs of that. But then she asked me whether I’d like to be a miner, and I wouldn’t, and then she reminded me about the scene I made (when extremely young) in the caves at Hastings, felt sick and cried and nearly fainted and had to be carried out. So I must be. Of course, if you’re not in the war, it is simply boring. Nastier food, and the bath water is seldom hot and being rather stuck because of not much petrol – all petty inconveniences, I agree, but petty things are still there, they don’t go away by being small. Our room was so icy this winter, that I invented a way of dressing entirely in bed.

  I’m not going to write this every day or it will get like Lydia: ‘Got up, had breakfast, went to lessons. We did geography and sums …’ Oh! it makes me yawn even to write that much.

  17 April. There was a really awful raid on London last night all night. St Paul’s is still standing with rubble all round it. Uncle Hugh rang in the morning so that Aunt Syb wouldn’t be too worried, but she is – all the time. She looks ill from worry. He said that there were five hundred planes that dropped thousands and thousands of bombs. Uncle Edward is back in the RAF so Uncle Hugh has to do all the family business by himself. The Brig doesn’t go to London much now, because he can’t do anything if he does, but Aunt Rach goes up for three nights a week to help in the office and she stays with a friend, but she has dinner with Uncle Hugh one evening a week because he is rather lonely.

  Aunt Jessica comes down here for weekends sometimes, but she has her mother’s house in London as poor Lady Rydal will never occupy it again. One of the worst things about being so old must be all the last times you do things. It must be sad for her to know she won’t ever go back to her own home, but Aunt Villy says she is past noticing that kind of thing. I don’t see how she can know that: I should think there must be some extremely sad, clear times, when Grania knows what is happening to her, but I think other people prefer to imagine that she is dotty all the time. It’s the same thing as not talking about anything difficult or awful. Hypocrisy is rife if you ask me.

  4 May. There is something going on about Angela. Aunt Jessica came down and she and Aunt Villy had a long private talk and emerged with that face they both have when things aren’t all right. I was passing the door (I really was – like people in books) and I heard ‘a most unsuitable entanglement’. That means, I suppose, that Angela knows someone whom her mother disapproves of, but how on earth could she go through life only knowing the ones who would meet with parental approval?

  Anyway, Aunt Villy is going to London with Aunt J. tomorrow, and guess what? They are bringing the famous Lorenzo and his wife down with them for the weekend! That will certainly be interesting. We do get rather short of human nature here, by which I suppose I mean people to observe whose behaviour might be unpredictable. Miss Milliment is getting more and more fussy about my writing what I mean, but at least she doesn’t seem to balk at anything I want to mean – like the rest of the family.

  The Duchy is worried because now Christopher has gone home, McAlpine can’t manage the whole garden and priority has to be given to vegetables. She interviewed a girl gardener last week who wears breeches and very thick oatmeal stockings and is called Heather. If she comes, she will sleep in Tonbridge’s cottage with Miss Milliment, but it is betted that she won’t stay because McAlpine will be so horrible to her. Jules is nearly out of nappies and is trying to walk. Ellen says she is very forward for her age – not quite one – and not having to air nappies for her all the time, which stops any heat from the nursery fire reaching people, will be a mercy. I must say she is a very sweet baby – awfully pretty with curly dark hair – whereas Roly still looks a bit like Mr Churchill – an endless face and tiny features.

  I asked Neville why he ran away and he said he was sick of doing the same things every day and being educated, which he says just means being told a whole lot of things that won’t be any use to him in later life. Also he is bored of Mervyn who he says is soppy and never has a single idea of anything interesting to do in their spare time, and also Neville despises him for not running away as well. In Ireland he was going to live by the sea with a donkey and fish. I said what about when Dad comes back? This was a mistake: he tried to kick me and said, ‘I hate you for going on about Dad. I really hate and loathe and dislike you for being so silly and horrible talking about him just whenever I’m not remembering him. That’s why I wanted to go to Ireland. To get away from everything.’ So then I realised how awfully he minds. I said I was sorry and I really hoped he wouldn’t go away because I’d miss him, and when I said it, I reali
sed that it was true: I would. But both those things – being sorry and missing him – sounded feeble and I could see he thought so too. ‘Well, please don’t go yet,’ I said, ‘I might come with you if you’d wait a bit.’ Not a satisfactory talk at all: I’m actually quite afraid he will run away again, and have decided to talk to Aunt Rach about it as she is the most sensible of the aunts.

  18 May. The Lorenzo weekend has got put off, because this evening Lady Rydal died. They rang in the middle of dinner: Aunt Rach answered the telephone, and came back and said that Matron would like to speak to Mrs Cazalet or Mrs Castle, so they both went to talk to her. When they came back, Aunt J. said she thought it was really a merciful release. I can’t see anything very merciful about it; mercy would have been her not having to go through all that miserable time in the nursing home in the first place. Anyway, they said there would be a lot to do – arranging the funeral, and putting it in The Times. Then they both wanted to ring up Lorenzo to put him off, and in the end, Aunt Jessica won (there is definitely something funny going on about all that – what a pity there isn’t going to be the chance to find out what) and she came back after rather a long time, and said he sent his love and was frightfully sorry. They are going to Tunbridge Wells tomorrow, and Aunt J. rang up Uncle Raymond, but she couldn’t get him, and Aunt Villy tried to ring Uncle Edward, but she couldn’t get him and I could see the Duchy worrying about the extravagance of all these toll calls. She was only sixty-nine, but if you’d told me she was eighty, I would have thought it more likely. I do wonder what it is like to die. Whether you know you are, or whether it just happens, like the lights fusing, and whether it is actually rather exciting. I suppose it depends very much on what you believe happens to you, if anything. Polly and I had a long talk about it. Polly thinks we may have other lives, which is what Hindus believe. Miss Milliment says that all the great religions take what happens to you after death very seriously, although, of course, they don’t agree. But I don’t have a great religion and nor does Polly. We spent a bit of time trying to think what we would like to have happen, and I thought being a sort of interested ghost might be good. Then she said that she supposed that what happened to you might be whatever you did believe. And since Lady Rydal was a very Victorian Christian, her heaven would be a harp-playing-wearing-long-white-clothes affair, we both think. And, of course, being reunited with her husband. Well, she never seemed very happy when she was alive, so perhaps being dead will be more enjoyable for her. I wished I’d been there when she died, because I’ve never seen a dead person, and I feel I need the experience. Still, at least they might let me go to the funeral.