The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Term began for her too, and for Clary and Lydia, and Neville, who went back to his school quite cheerfully, Clary said, because he had learned to imitate Lord Haw-Haw perfectly and was looking forward to showing this off.

  Archie Lestrange, who stayed with them for a fortnight the first time, came back in September, and Clary got so worked up about this that Polly wondered whether she was in love. She suggested this possibility to Clary, who got into a frightful temper – said she was mad and trying to spoil everything and she must have a horrible mind to think of anything so idiotic and horrible. Then she sulked, and they had two days and – worse – two tense, silent, icily polite evenings going to bed and getting up in the morning. In the end she apologised in the most humble language she could bring to bear, and Clary, having reiterated how idiotic she was to have thought of such a thing, forgave her. Later, when they were taking it in turns to have the small and tepid bath, she said, ‘Actually, I can sort of see why you thought anything so mad. The thing is that I do like him awfully. And I think he looks nice and he makes me laugh – like Dad does – and I respect him for his opinions on things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Well, pretty well everything. Of course, we haven’t talked about absolutely everything, but he agrees that women should have careers and that writing is very important and that people being worse than animals is really only saying how nice animals are – and he sometimes tells me things about my mother – he knew her a bit you see. You know my postcard she sent me with her love on it? Well, he was on that holiday with her and Dad – he can actually remember her saying, ‘I must get a postcard to send to little Clary.’ He told me a lot of things. She used to wear blue a lot and she loved a drink called Dubonnet that they drank in cafés, and she couldn’t eat shrimps and prawns and things like that, or strawberries, but he said it wasn’t the time of year for them so it didn’t matter. And do you know – the best thing? One evening he asked her if she was happy and she said, “I honestly think I’m the luckiest person in the world. The only thing I miss is not having Clary with me.” She must have loved me to say that, don’t you think?’ Seeing Clary’s eyes – a true glass to her heart – and recognising the faithful love that neither time nor misfortune seemed ever to quench, Polly felt too much to say anything.

  But when she had washed Clary’s back, she said, ‘I do see why you like him. I do anyway, but I certainly would even more if I were you.’

  Her mother did go to London the following week, and she didn’t tell Dad so it was a surprise for him. Polly felt very pleased at having had such a good idea for them, although she found afternoons with Wills surprisingly exhausting. He was at a really frightful age, she thought. He seemed only to want to do things that were dangerous for him, or destructive for other people, and when thwarted, he lay on the ground, arched his back and howled. ‘I honestly think he may turn into a dictator,’ she said to Ellen after the second day.

  ‘He just wants his own way,’ she said comfortably. ‘Just let him lie and pay no attention to him. He’ll soon stop.’ He did, but he soon started again. In between tantrums, he was very fond of her and gave her charming smiles. But she reflected gloomily that dictators were all supposed to be particularly charming when they chose.

  But on Friday, when her parents returned, she was shocked by her mother’s appearance. She looked completely worn out – her face had an unusual yellowish tinge, and she had shadowy circles under her eyes. Dad looked grey as well, although they both greeted everyone with a kind of determined cheerfulness before her mother said she thought she would have a little rest before dinner. Polly went up with her to see whether she wanted her case unpacked, or would like a cup of tea, but she said no, she didn’t want anything: she was scrabbling in her handbag and produced a very small bottle of pills.

  ‘Oh, Mummy, you’re not taking more aspirin? You know Dr Carr said—’

  ‘These aren’t aspirin. My back aches from sitting in the car for so long.’ She shook two out onto the palm of her hand and crammed them into her mouth.

  ‘Don’t you want some water with them?’

  ‘No – I don’t need that.’ She was sitting on the side of the bed kicking off her shoes. Now she looked up suddenly, and said in a funny half-pleading, half-jocular manner, ‘But you won’t say a word to Dad about my taking these, will you? He’ll only fuss, and I really couldn’t cope with a fuss. Promise?’

  She promised, but she felt uneasy about it. When her mother was on the bed, she put an eiderdown over her, kissed her hot, damp forehead, and left.

  She hovered at the top of the back stairs, wondering whether to go and find Dad – not to tell him about the pills, of course, she’d promised not to, but to see if she could find out why her mother was so awfully tired – they’d probably gone out to theatres and dinners every night …

  Then she heard voices, coming from the morning room whose door must be open.

  ‘… absolute madness, but I had to pretend it was all right, of course.’

  There was the sound of a soda syphon being squirted. Then her father’s voice continued, ‘Thanks, Villy. Do I need this!’

  Aunt Villy said, ‘Hugh, darling, I’m so sorry. What can I do?

  ‘It’s sweet of you, but I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Are you sure she has no idea?

  ‘She has none. I tested that out this week and drew a merciful blank. She has no idea at all.’

  ‘She’s going to need nursing, you know. I mean, I can do all that’s needed now – but—’

  She heard steps coming towards the door and shrank back against the banisters. But the door was simply shut and then she could only hear a murmur, but not what the voices said.

  THE FAMILY

  Autumn – Winter, 1941

  ‘Potato pie? How very amusing!’

  ‘Amusing? Potato pie? I must say, Dolly, you have the strangest sense of humour. Try as I will, I can see nothing to laugh at in a potato.’

  ‘But then, dear, you have never been known for your sense of humour.’

  Fifteen all, Villy thought, as she sat at the morning-room desk paying bills for the Duchy. The great-aunts always spent the morning in that room, so named because it did not get morning sun which their generation deemed bad for the complexion, not that the aunts’ complexions were in a state worthy of preservation: Aunt Dolly’s ponderous cheeks, like a spaniel’s ears, were a damp mauve that reminded her of mountains in amateur water colours of Scotland, and Aunt Flo’s resembled, as one of the children had remarked, a dog biscuit peppered with flourishing blackheads – due, as Dolly frequently observed, to her penchant for washing her face in cold water without soap. Flo was crocheting a blanket made from odds and ends of wool, and Dolly was mending a winter vest. Villy had managed to stop them appealing to her over their disagreements on the grounds that she was adding things up which had reduced them for a few minutes to a respectful silence. They spent every morning sewing and quarrelling gently, usually these days, about food. They always knew the menus for the day, having happened to overhear or happened to see the paper on which the Duchy wrote the results of her morning interview with Mrs Cripps.

  ‘I do faintly wonder what a potato pie is made with,’ Dolly said, not very much later.

  ‘There must be a distinct possibility that it is made with potato.’

  ‘I do wish, sometimes, that you wouldn’t try to be sarcastic: it really doesn’t suit you. I meant, if it is a pie, will it be the sort with pastry, or will it be like shepherd’s pie with mashed potato on top?’

  ‘I should have thought it was fairly obvious that it would have pastry. You couldn’t have mashed potatoes above ordinary ones. I mean, why have a pie at all, if that’s what you’re going to do?’

  She said this so accusingly that Dolly retorted, ‘It wasn’t my idea. It was Kitty. After she read that Mr Churchill has made potatoes one penny a pound to encourage us to eat more, she has been trying to think of new ways to use them.’

/>   Everything that happened was done by Mr Churchill, Villy noticed. Everything good, that is. Everything bad, of course, was done by Hitler. You would think they were conducting a personal war with everybody else on the receiving end.

  ‘Of course, there might be some cheese in it. Just a little, grated, for flavour.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. We had cauliflower cheese again yesterday, and macaroni cheese is usually on Sunday nights. You must remember that cheese is rationed.’

  Of course Dolly knew that, of course she did: she really wondered sometimes whether Flo thought she was mad.

  They bickered on through the classic routine of umbrage, severe umbrage (just reached), to peace-making nostalgia about pre-war food, and back to ruminations about the meals in immediate prospect. Really, Villy thought, they behaved in most respects as though there wasn’t a war at all: they would probably have talked about food wherever they were in time or space; they sewed all morning with a longish break for Bovril and biscuits, rested after luncheon, went – if the weather was fine – for a little stroll in the garden before tea, sewed again until the six o’clock news whose contents they were never able to agree upon afterwards, had a little rest before changing out of their jersey suits into woollen dresses and rather painful-looking pointed shoes with marcasite buckles for dinner, and retired punctually at ten o’clock to the bedroom they shared. The Duchy was kind to her sisters because they had never married, and she was of the generation that regarded the single state as a minor tragedy. She also had been heard to say that they had been extraordinarily good to their father when he had become frenetically senile. The Brig regarded them as part of the fixtures of family life and occasionally, when he could find no other audience, told them one of his duller stories.

  But then, Villy considered that her life was much as it had been. At the beginning of the war, she had imagined herself doing some useful and interesting war work – perhaps training for some job in the War Office or in a large hospital. But it hadn’t turned out like that at all. First there had been Roly, the unexpected baby, well over two now but still, she felt, requiring her presence. Even without him, there had been the fact that the household at Home Place had so enlarged that it was unfair to expect the Duchy to run it single-handed, and Rachel, who might have taken over a great deal of it, had been seconded to the family firm where she now worked four days a week. Neither Sybil nor Zoë was up to the sort of chronic, often exhausting maintenance that was needed. Things that would have been replaced now had to be mended; the coke and coal rations meant that more wood was burned and Villy, with Heather to help, spent about two afternoons a week with the big saw, cutting logs dragged from the woods by Wren and the old pony. Drinking water had to be collected from the well and the bottles brought up the hill on a wheelbarrow since their petrol ration was all used for the station and weekly shopping trips to Battle. There was a massive amount of laundry, and getting clothes dry in winter was a nightmare, as there was no central heating – regarded by the Duchy as extremely unhealthy. Villy had devised a line in the boiler room which had been cleaned out by Tonbridge – he had proved useless at sawing wood – and this was always full of steaming clothes. The preserving of fruit and vegetables at this time of the year was also a full-time job. Here Zoë and the girls helped Mrs Cripps. Villy ran the local first-aid classes one night a week and did two nights at the nursing home, as Matron was constantly short of good staff. And now there was Sybil needing help, which was more difficult since so much tact was needed in giving it. She could not, would not, face the fact that she was not able to look after Wills on her own for more than very brief periods, so somebody had to be on hand to relieve her of him under the pretext of his tea, or a walk with Roly or some game the children had devised for him. She was indomitable: the only time she had really confided in Villy had been after the week she had spent in London with Hugh. The house, mostly shut up since Hugh used only the kitchen and their bedroom, had been dirty and thoroughly ill kept: the char she had employed to come three mornings a week was clearly doing nothing but clean the bath and make Hugh’s bed plus a little washing up. She had spent the first day shopping for food and trying to open up the drawing room, with the consequence that she was dead beat by the time Hugh arrived home from work and had burned the careful stew she had made by forgetting it. Hugh had taken her out, but she had been too tired to eat. After that, he had taken her out every night to supper, but the days, spent buying her presents for Christmas, ‘It seemed the last chance I would have for that’, and trying to clean the house, had exhausted her, and Villy suspected that the strain of trying not to seem so tired in front of Hugh must have made it much worse. She told Villy that she had, unknown to Hugh, paid a visit to Dr Ballater, who, she said, had been extremely kind and had prescribed some pills ‘that make a wonderful difference’. Only she hadn’t been able to take them much in London with Hugh because they often made her feel quite woozy and she was afraid he would notice. ‘Only I must say,’ she had said to Villy on that occasion, ‘I do sometimes wonder when it is all going to stop.’ Then, before Villy could reply, or even think how to reply, she had said, ‘The thing is, I don’t want to worry poor darling Hugh till I – have to. Would you help me about that? You’re the only person I can ask.’ And she, feeling unable to break her promise to Hugh, found herself making a second promise to Sybil.

  Since then, she had once tried suggesting to Hugh that perhaps Sybil did recognise that she was rather ill and he had instantly agreed, but said that none the less she thought she was going to get better and must not on any account be disabused. He knew he was right, he said. Look at the situation: he had to be in London all of every week when all he wanted was to be with Sybil. But Villy knew that weekends were a fearful strain for both of them. In the end, she had telephoned Edward at Hendon and asked him to meet her for lunch in London and he had arranged it for the very next day.

  ‘Anything up?’ he had asked after they had kissed. ‘You sounded rather serious on the telephone.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  They were in his club and he signalled the waiter and ordered two large gins and Frenches. ‘It sounds as though we may need them,’ he said: he seemed uncharacteristically nervous.

  ‘It’s Hugh and Sybil,’ she began and, to her surprise, saw his face clear before it assumed a different concern.

  She explained. That Sybil had cancer – what they had all feared when she had had the first operation. That she knew and Hugh knew, but that they would not tell each other. ‘It all seems so sad, and absurd and unnecessary,’ she finished. ‘But he does want to be with her and, of course, he can’t—’

  ‘The Old Man rang me up,’ Edward interrupted, ‘not about that, as a matter of fact. He simply said that the business was getting too much for Hugh on his own. We’re getting a hell of a lot of Government orders, and with the sawmills still in chaos from the blitz – only one is working properly – and the shortage of staff, Hugh is having a hell of a time. He asked me to apply for leave to come and sort things out. I’m waiting to hear about that, but the CO seems to think it will come through. God! Poor old boy! It must be utter hell for him.’

  ‘Could you talk to him? About talking to Sybil – clearing things between them?’

  ‘I could try, but he’s as obstinate as the devil. I’ve never been able to get him to change his mind about anything. Do the others know?’

  ‘I think they must suspect, but it isn’t mentioned. And after Sybil making me promise not to say a word to Hugh, it seemed difficult to talk to anyone else. But I do worry about the older children though, Polly and Simon, I mean. I don’t think it should come to them as a frightful shock. Of course, Polly adores her father which should be a comfort to them both.’

  ‘Lucky Hugh.’

  Knowing that Louise was rude and unpleasant to him – yet another reason for being displeased with her – Villy said quickly, ‘Lydia adores you. You should take her out for a treat – she’d simply love it
. She’s got a birthday quite soon. Ten! She’s growing up, you know.’

  ‘She’s a dear little thing,’ he said absently. When they were finishing lunch, he said, ‘Have you heard from Louise?’

  ‘One letter from Northampton. Entirely filled with her theatre doings. She’s completely wrapped up in herself – too utterly selfish for words. She behaves as though there simply wasn’t a war. But after this year, she really must buckle down to a sensible job. I’m relying on you to read the riot act to her.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be any earthly use at that,’ he said. ‘Shall we have our coffee in the other room? Then we can smoke.’

  After lunch he said he must get back to Hendon, saw her into a cab – although he’d offered to drop her off at Charing Cross – and then repaired to an anonymous and dreary little flat in Sloane Avenue where he had arranged to meet Diana.

  Villy, although she had not said so, had no intention of going straight back to Sussex, and since, at such short notice, she had been unable to get in touch with Lorenzo, she had decided to pay a visit to Jessica in St John’s Wood. There she would at least get news of him, as ringing his home simply meant a tense, uncomfortable conversation with Mercedes, who never seemed to be out and picked up the telephone on the second ring. She had only seen him once since that heavenly train journey, although he did occasionally write to her. But, oddly, she did not understand why, her romantic devotion seemed to flourish with absence: she felt that she knew him better and loved him more for his separation. In fact, she was easily able to enlarge upon and embroider their conversation in the train; she felt she knew how he would feel and what he would say, how he would listen to her confidences and what his responses to them would be. Sometimes, of course, she did just sorely miss him, but this was simply a part of their fate: the tragedy of previous indissoluble attachments. These conversations that they had took place when she was alone in her bedroom at night. Sometimes he would come even before she had undressed, and she would feel shy about taking off her clothes in front of him. Also, she knew that he must want her dreadfully, and it was not fair on him to make this worse. Sometimes, he waited until she was in bed, and then he would sit on the side of it, holding – kissing – her hand and gazing at her with joy. They would discuss the hopelessness of their situation, and although he at first had been unsure, in the end he had agreed that it was worse for her than it could be for him. His wife’s jealousy and general unreason would give him sympathy from the world, whereas it could not be expected to have a grain of sympathy for her. Edward was acknowledged to be a very handsome, charming and generous husband, who had given her four children, two of whom were still very young. In any case, there was nothing to be done. Senses of nobility, self sacrifice would see to that. So then it would be suggested that they should enjoy the little time that they had, and this would result in delicious mutual confidences and admiration. The evening would end with a reprise of its beginning: nobody else in the world could be expected to put up with Mercedes, and Edward would be devastated if he had the slightest idea of her feelings for another man. What they each had to endure in terms of jealous scenes – with, of course, no foundation – and physical intimacy, which Villy had to regard as part of her marital responsibility, meant that compassion now played a large part: they were so desperately sorry for one another and their powerlessness to provide aid or respite only made them suffer more for each other. In the end, she would become exhausted with emotion, something he was wonderfully quick to perceive, as with one last kiss – on her forehead rather daringly – he would vanish. She would fall asleep, tired, but exquisitely peaceful …