The taxi had stopped. She paid the ancient driver and got out. The little gothic house was where darling Daddy had died, where she had afterwards spent innumerable afternoons infested with the boredom that only her mother, it seemed, had ever generated. The dining-room shutters were closed – perhaps Jessica was away? A nuisance if she was as the cab had gone creaking off. Someone was in: she heard feet on the stairs, but whoever it was didn’t come to the door. Annoyed, Villy rang again: some instinct made her look up, and she saw Jessica at the bedroom window, but before she could call or wave she’d gone. After what seemed like ages, there was only one flight of stairs, Jessica opened the door.
‘Villy!’ she cried – much too loudly, Villy thought: it sounded like a stage welcome – ‘What a lovely surprise! I had no idea you were in town!’ She was wearing a kind of smock or overall and her feet were bare and her hair, done these days usually in a small bun on the top of the back of her head, was loose. She looked startled and extraordinarily young, Villy thought – her eyes, usually so tired and dreamy – were glittering …
‘I’ve been tidying poor Mummy’s papers and stuff,’ she said. ‘I was just going to have a bath.’
‘What a funny time to have a bath, darling!’
By now they were in the hall, but Jessica did not seem to want them to stay there. She put her arm around Villy and propelled her into the drawing room. ‘I do have baths at funny times. Any time except in the evening. My nightmare is being caught in the bath with an air raid starting.’ She shut the drawing-room door and led Villy to the far end of the room. ‘We could almost sit in the garden,’ she said.
They both looked out at the small square garden whose lawn, too long, was spattered by livid yellow lime leaves, at the rustic bird table standing at a drunken angle as a result of a nearby bomb, at the black walls and the mildewed Michaelmas daisies and neither of them wished to do anything of the kind.
‘I’m not much of a gardener, I’m afraid. And, anyway, I never seem to have time. Sit down, darling, and have a fag, and tell me what brings you to London. You might have let me know and I’d have given you lunch.’
In the brief silence while Jessica lit her cigarette for her, Villy thought she heard the sound of a door shutting … the front door.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Nobody. Probably someone putting something in the letter box.’
‘Oh. Well, I came up to have lunch with Edward. Then it seemed rather feeble just to go straight back. So I came for a gossip.’
‘Well, we can’t gossip without tea. I’ll pop down and make a pot.’
The kitchen in the basement was large and dark with huge, business-like pieces of furniture: a vast dresser with drawers as unwieldy as boulders in a dry stone wall, and willow-patterned platters for family joints on the shelves, a big range and an enormous scrubbed kitchen table on which lay a tray with two coffee cups, a toast rack and two soup plates that had clearly contained baked beans.
Jessica said, ‘Don’t say it – I am a slut,’ and quickly moved the tray onto the draining board by the sink.
‘I’ve been so worried about Angela,’ she said. ‘I simply don’t know what is going on …’
While she made the tea, she enlarged upon this. Angela had become extremely difficult to get hold of – one had to leave messages at the BBC and God knew if she ever got them as she hardly ever responded. There was no telephone at her flat and the only times Jessica had ever been there, she had been out, her flatmate said. ‘I offered to take her away for a few days after she had – after the D and C, but she wouldn’t come. She’s become so hard and unresponsive!’ Jessica complained. ‘And, of course, falling in love with a married man, as we all know, is madness!’
There was silence, while Villy sipped her tea and they both had (rather different) thoughts about the madness.
‘Of course, she’s stopped seeing him—’ Villy ventured.
‘My dear, she can’t! She works in the same department. Of course, she ought to ask for a transfer or join the Wrens or something …’
When they had said all that there was to be said – by them – about Angela, they went on to Raymond, Louise and Christopher, who, Jessica said, sounded very miserable. ‘He’s spent months now, levelling ground for a runway near Nuneaton, which is pretty hard, dull work, and the people he does it with only want to go to pubs in the evenings and chase girls.’
‘Couldn’t he do something else? I mean, he’s put in a good stint.’
‘Raymond made him. And he knows that Raymond expects him to volunteer for one of the Services: I think making him do this is some kind of punishment. He’d be much happier as a farmer, but Raymond would think that infra dig. I do wish he wasn’t so frightened of his father. It would serve Raymond bloody well right if he went off with a barmaid.’
There was a short silence. Villy knew that she ought to go if she was to catch the train that Tonbridge met every day, and said so. ‘Have you seen Laurence at all?’ she asked as they walked up the basement stairs.
‘From time to time I do.’
‘I thought as you live so near one anoth—’
‘Ah yes, but so does Mercedes! She doesn’t exactly encourage one to pop in. Poor Laurence! I don’t know how he stands it! She has the most fearful temper and she suspects every woman in the world of trying to carry him off. To work as hard as he does and then have to go home to a woman who screams like a parrot and smashes things – and if you saw her you’d never imagine she’d be like that—’
‘I have met her,’ Villy said rather coldly, ‘at Frensham, with you.’
‘Of course you have. Anyway, I think he’s a saint. I often tell him that it would serve her right if he did go off with one of those luscious sopranos he rehearses with.’
‘I thought you didn’t see him much!’
‘I told you, from time to time. Darling, do you want me to call you a cab? There might be one on the rank.’
But Villy said she’d rather walk.
‘I’ll give him your love, shall I?’
‘Yes. Yes, do. Thanks for the tea. And do put some more clothes on, darling, or you’ll catch your death.’ She had noticed when Jessica leaned towards her to light her cigarette, that she hadn’t been wearing a bra, and she thought now, as she descended the steps to the street, that this was most unseemly in someone of Jessica’s age. She felt the visit had not been rewarding: and she found Jessica’s attitude towards Lorenzo irritating; she behaved quite as though he was her friend and as though she, Villy, hardly knew him. But then she reflected that secrecy was another part of the price people like she and Lorenzo had to pay; therefore it was natural that Jessica should be entirely in the dark; after all, there was no harm in her showing off about her comparatively shallow intimacy – her generally open behaviour about him simply implied her innocence and his discretion. She picked up a cab deciding that the next invitation for the Clutterworths to stay need not include Jessica on the grounds that the house would be too full.
Lydia and Neville had put their offer to mind the younger children in the afternoon to good use, as they had long wanted to run a hospital and had been deterred largely from lack of patients. Now they had Wills, Roly and Juliet, who lay in a nervous row on damp camp beds left over from the evacuation of the Babies’ Hotel. They had chosen the squash court because it was out of earshot and, as they had expected the game to be a long one, the chances of someone crying were quite high. Neville was a doctor, and Lydia the nurse. On two other beds lay Lydia’s favourite old bear and Golly Amazement. They were both awaiting operations.
‘It’s a pity I can’t operate on a real person,’ Neville said, ‘but I think it would be unwise.’
‘It would be horrible as well,’ Lydia said anxiously.
‘I don’t think it would. People are simply made of skin and blood and bones and things. But we haven’t got any anaesthetic so we can’t.’ The bear and Golly Amazement were to be given doses of the Brig’s brandy, and tied to bedposts
, which is what Neville had read people did in the old days. Immobilising the others had not been difficult: they had both attended so many first-aid classes as patients for people to practise on that they were adept with splints and bandages, and all three now had an arm and a leg so dealt with. There had been some initial protest, but Lydia had cleverly quietened them down with medicine made up by herself of gripe water, two aspirin ground up, brandy pinched from the Brig’s study, and quite a lot of Crimson Lake from her paintbox to make it look like medicine. Wills had simply loved it, and kept saying, ‘More,’ until he had fallen into a stertorous slumber; most of the medicine she had given Juliet had trickled down her chin and elsewhere, but she loved Lydia and Neville, and as long as they talked to her sometimes and gave her things to play with, she lay obediently with one stiff leg stretched out. Roly was the trouble. He had hated having his arm put in a sling, and splinting both his legs had made matters worse. In the end, they had to undo the sling and give him a stick of barley sugar which he was now resentfully sucking. The bear, who was to be operated on first, had had his stout furry legs secured, and Lydia gave him pretending teaspoonsful of brandy before Neville, kneeling by the bed, made a steady sawing cut across his stomach with the bread knife. There were weak crackling sounds, and some straw and sawdust fell out. Neville plunged his hand into the hole and then – a conjuring trick learned at school – drew out a small sheet of paper. ‘He’ll be better without this, Nurse,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘His appendix. It’s something that is often taken out of people.’
Lydia took the piece of paper. ‘Apendix’ it said at the top of the page, followed by some rather boring writing about history, she thought.
‘Sew him up, Nurse,’ Neville commanded. ‘Don’t want him bleeding to death.’
Lydia obediently wielded her large darning needle threaded with black cotton, but the bear’s rather worn skin was very difficult to sew and the more she squeezed some bits of him together, the more sawdust came out from the rest of the hole. ‘You’re making me do the far most difficult part,’ she complained. But Neville was sawing away at one of Golly Amazement’s legs which came off with alarming ease. Roland began to cry and, when no notice was taken of him, to yell. This woke Wills up, and wanting to go to Roly, he fell out of bed. In a matter of moments all three of them were screaming.
‘Give them all some more medicine, Nurse,’ Neville said. He was wrapping Golly Amazement’s stump in one of his socks.
‘I’ve used it all up. Oh, poor Wills! He fell on his head – he’s got a cut!’
‘Sew it up.’
‘I can’t! The thread’s all in the bear. I’m not enjoying myself! Oh, poor Roly! His feet are all blue. You did the bandages too tight. Oh, do help!’
Mercifully for the patients, Ellen suddenly appeared. She had had her doubts about the children minding her babies, and had been searching for them when she heard distant wails. She seized Juliet, commanded Lydia to fetch her mother at once, told Neville to undo Roly’s splints while she comforted Wills and Juliet.
Later, there was an awful row. They wanted to know about the medicine, which Neville said Lydia was stupid to mention – he had a row with her afterwards – and they were both sent to bed without supper. Her mother sewed up the bear and Golly Amazement, but his leg was never the same again.
‘It seems awfully unfair to get punished for something I didn’t even enjoy!’ Lydia wept. ‘Neville made me do all the hard things like sewing and getting the brandy, and it was my bear and my Golly.’
‘You gave Golly Amazement to Wills,’ Villy reminded her.
‘I did, but I’ve taken him back because Wills didn’t like him enough. I always take my presents back if people don’t love them. Neville got an Appendix out of the bear and it was just a piece of paper. That’s stupid, isn’t it? People don’t go about with pieces of paper in them.’
‘I knew they didn’t,’ Neville immediately said after Villy had agreed that they didn’t and Lydia challenged him. ‘Of course I knew that! But if I’d taken out a real one – an appendix is a kind of wormy root, if you must know – you’d have been screaming all over the place. I was trying to be kind!’ he complained. ‘And I probably saved your beastly bear’s life.’
The moment he set eyes on Sid, Archie understood what had been a torturing mystery to him for the best part of seventeen years.
Rachel brought her down on a Friday evening: she had had flu badly, and there was nobody to look after her at home, Rachel said, and there was something in her voice of over-casual kindness, that Archie, extremely sensitive to every nuance of tone, gesture or even expression of hers, picked up at once. Involuntarily, he glanced at Sid – and knew. So it had not been personal, after all: it had been both a far more serious matter and one which could have had little or nothing to do with him. The anguish, the waste, the sheer grudge of being rejected all those years ago slipped entirely and so suddenly from him that he felt weightless, light-headed with shock. He watched Sid, this small tired woman in her tweed suit, her cropped hair, her most carefully tied cravat – saw the Duchy kiss her, lead her to an armchair nearest the fire while Rachel went in search of drinks for them. He was introduced; Rachel returned with a tray, cigarettes were lit, gin was poured, the family came and went while the past acquired its perspective. Hugh arrived from London saying that Edward was coming in the morning. On Saturdays, Miss Milliment and Heather, ‘the lady gardener’ as the Duchy called her, dined with them, and as he discussed French painting with Miss Milliment – Van Gogh and his pathetic attempts to welcome and please the churlish Gauguin, and Signac who painted further along the coast and whom he had met once or twice – he could not help watching that tired face with the brown, very wide-apart eyes, the wide mouth, the senses of mischief and uncertainty and fatigue that crossed Sid’s face, making her look like a noble little monkey, a displaced person, an unutterably weary middle-aged woman by turns, then turning his covert attention to Rachel whose name would now always hold a double image for him; for at the moment of his discovery she had aged, had ceased to be the ethereally beautiful, frank and innocent young girl he had loved so much, and become a charming careworn woman in her early forties. It seemed extraordinary that he had not seen her till now, but it was disillusion of an unpainful kind. Her reality somehow reassured him; she was a kind, good, unselfish creature with the same beautiful frank eyes, but he knew that now, at least, she was not frank in one respect, and he wondered whether he had been the means whereby she had discovered her own nature – for she had concealed nothing from him, he was sure. When he had taken her into the garden at the Lynch House – a lovely still June evening – she had not known until he kissed her that she had not wanted to be kissed, but had then broken away from him with a small sound of revulsion that he had never been able to forget. At the time he had thought it was fear and had held onto her arm, pleading, reassuring, but at the same time, and he never forgot this either, he had experienced a sense of triumph that he must be the first with her – that if he could win her she would be entirely his, she was wild and he had but to tame her with patience – no mean conquest since she was so desirable and older than he. But she had told him to let go of her with such cold sincerity that he had lost his nerve. He had been twenty-two at the time. And the next morning she had sent for him, had told him how much she had liked him and said that she could never marry him. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I expect I should have known it before.’
There must be someone else, he had said. No, she had answered, there was nobody. He began telling her how much he loved her – he had been young enough to feel that that must make all the difference – he said he would wait, give her any amount of time she wanted to know her mind.
‘I do know it,’ she said. ‘You are only making it worse for yourself. Poor Archie! I’m so sorry.’
He had left the house that day and, soon after, he had gone to France – to get away from Rupert and his family and thei
r friends, who had all gone about together in a close, carefree set. His father had left him a small amount of money, and he settled in Provence and painted and gave English and drawing lessons and sold some pictures and managed. Rupert and Isobel had spent a holiday with him.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 93