‘Wouldn’t we be comfier in bed?’ he said, and immediately sensed that that was quite the wrong thing to say. ‘What did you want to talk about, darling?’
‘I don’t know that I want to talk about it,’ she answered at once. ‘I just want to tell you, I suppose. I think I’m having a baby.’
‘Oh, Lord!’
‘In fact I’m certain I am. So you see my problem.’
He didn’t at all. ‘Sorry, darling, I’m being rather dense.’
‘Isla will know it isn’t Angus’s.’ Then, as though she knew he would ask why, she said, ‘I haven’t set eyes on him since the beginning of the summer holidays. He joined us at Duninald for a couple of days. And now we’re nearly into November. I’m between two and three months gone.’
‘My God! I do see. You can’t tell her you saw Angus in London – something like that?’
‘They write to each other regularly. She’d find out at once. If Angus found out, he’d divorce me like a shot.’
‘Is there anything you can do about it?’
‘You mean, have an abortion? Where? Don’t forget, I’ve been tucked away in the country, I’m completely out of touch, I don’t know anybody.’
‘I could try and – ask around – you know – there must be someone.’
‘I don’t want any little backstreet butcher mucking me up,’ she said bitterly. ‘They’re my insides, not yours.’
‘Darling, I’m only trying to help. We’re both married. I don’t see what else there is to do.’
‘Don’t you? I suppose there isn’t anything.’ She began to cry.
He put his arm round her and felt for his handkerchief. At the same time the scenario of her having the baby, getting divorced from Angus, and his telling Villy and getting a divorce from her coursed through his mind and he shrank from it. It would take years and be terrible the whole time: he doubted whether they could survive it. At the same time, not doing any of that was leaving Diana in the lurch. The thought of being married to her recurred. If only he’d met her years ago! He couldn’t start disrupting everything now, in the middle of a war, and Roly only two, he really couldn’t. But he seemed to be in a position where there wasn’t a decent thing he could do. Comfort the poor girl, he could do that. He stroked her, and murmured words of love, said he couldn’t bear to see her cry, made her drink some of his whisky, and she did stop crying – he could see she had made an effort to do that – and it touched him. He undressed her: he wasn’t very good at it, clumsy with her bra hooks, but she helped him in the end. In bed, he made love to her as unselfishly as he knew how and, funnily enough, this made him love her more. Afterwards they talked for hours and finished the whisky. In the end he got round to saying that he knew that Villy’s sister must have found someone, as her daughter got in the family way not long ago, and it was dealt with. ‘And that chap’s bound to be all right or she wouldn’t have let Angela go to him,’ he said.
‘For God’s sake, don’t tell her! She would tell Villy and—’
‘Of course I won’t. I’ll say it’s for a young friend of mine in the RAF,’ he said. ‘I’ll manage that – don’t you worry.’
‘It’s probably frightfully expensive—’
‘Don’t worry about that either. That’s the least I can do.’
‘You know, I’m practically certain Jamie’s yours,’ she said. ‘It seems so awful to keep having babies without their father.’
She had never actually said that about Jamie before, although he had certainly wondered. What with alcohol, emotion and fatigue she was on the brink of becoming maudlin. He kissed her and said, ‘Jaime’s wonderful because he’s yours. You know I love him. Now, we’d better both get some sleep.’
And she had gone out like a light, but the bed was narrow for the two of them, and it took him time to get off, and then he slept fitfully.
Now, in the cold light of day, and by Jove, it was cold, he thought, he’d better make some tea for them both, since there was nothing to have for breakfast. This entailed padding down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and struggling to find tea and the tin of dried milk, which he had no idea how to mix, while the kettle was boiling. In the end, he took the tin up with him, alongside a jug of water. His head was beginning to throb and his mouth felt vile partly because he’d slept in his false teeth. He cleaned them all, the living and the dead, as he called them, and gave himself a stiff draught of Andrew’s Liver Salts before he woke her up.
The tea was rather nasty, but she said it was a great deal better than nothing.
As he dropped her off at the cottage at Wadhurst, he said, ‘I’ll ring you on Monday evening. From the office, just before I leave. About five.’
‘If you make it half past, Isla’ll be at her WI meeting.’
‘Right. God bless.’
He drove on wondering what would be the most tactful way of tackling Jessica about an abortionist. Tact was certainly required: he was not supposed to know about Angela only, of course, Villy had told him, on top of which, Jessica, who was pretty sharp, would not be likely to believe that he wanted one for a friend unless he was very convincing. He began to regret having suggested it, but he’d have to go through with it now.
But he didn’t have to, because on Monday morning Diana rang him at the office to say that Angus had been killed – in an air raid on Portsmouth.
‘Poor darling. Do you feel—’
‘I don’t know what I feel,’ she said. ‘Stunned, mostly. We hadn’t been getting on, but all the same it seems a fearful waste. He so loved the Army – a civilian death seems rather a sell.’ She sounded brittle with shock. ‘He was going to be sent overseas,’ she said. ‘He was looking forward to it. Apparently it wasn’t even a particularly bad raid.’ He could not think of anything to say.
‘Poor Isla’s devastated,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you needn’t worry. I can tell her a story now and she’ll want to believe it.’ Then she said, ‘I’m going to ring off now: I really can’t think of anything else to say.’
He wrote her a letter later on that day. He wasn’t used to writing them, but he felt for her. He could see how she must feel guilty, and how difficult it must be to be living with her sister-in-law and having to pretend to feel more than she did. And she was pregnant, and money, which had always been tight, would now be tighter on a widow’s pension. He couldn’t manage to say much of this in his letter, but he told her he would help in any way that he could and that he was sorry. And he sent his love and said he would keep in close touch. It wouldn’t help her much, he knew: nothing helped guilt except absolution from whomever one had harmed, and he, of all people, knew how awful it was when you had no hope of that.
The platform of the station at Oxford Circus was, as usual, crowded. By this time of night, everybody who slept on it had commandeered their place – the same one every night, Angela had begun to notice. The most favoured slept next to the slot machines that contained a small mirror in which, no doubt, they could comb out their hair in the morning. Many of them slept in curlers. They spread layers of newspaper on the ground, covered it with a blanket, and a pillow, if they had one, and then lay fully clothed with another blanket on top. Over the weeks, they must have become used to the preliminary rush of warm, dark brown air that was pushed through the tunnel in front of each train, arriving with a crescendo of sound that died away to a high-pitched little mechanical ticking. A second’s silence: then there would be the hiss of the doors opening and a pause while the passengers got in and out of the train before a weary voice called, ‘Mind the doors!’ whereupon with a convulsive, moaning lurch it was off again, gathering speed, its rocking racket gradually dying away as it disappeared into the tunnel. Every three or four minutes this happened, and yet people slept through it. When she came off duty after the night shift at six thirty in the morning, there they would be, bleary-eyed, taking out their curlers and dropping them into biscuit tins or brown paper carrier bags, making up their faces in the slot-machine mirrors or with tiny
ones from their handbags, drinking tea out of Thermos flasks, not saying anything much to one another. The men, who were mostly old, would still be asleep since their toilet was minimal: old boys on their backs, their mouths open, snoring, their sparse yellow-grey hair ruffled by the approach of each train.
Outside the station it was utterly dark, and very cold. Angela had always been thin, but since her abortion she had not wanted to eat much at all and had become much thinner, so she felt the cold. She only had to cross the road to reach the Peter Robinson building, now housing the Overseas Service of the BBC. She was the most junior continuity announcer, and had been working for six weeks now. Brian had got her the job – he was quite high up in the administration – and she knew he had pulled strings to get her in. ‘I must try and make it up to you somehow,’ he had said, on their last private meeting. Although it seemed extraordinary to her that he could seriously equate an admittedly better job with being in love, having his baby and being rejected. She had not meant to get pregnant, but when she was, she had told him at once, thinking it would turn the scales, that he would leave the wife he either never spoke of or spasmodically disparaged, and marry her. But he had been appalled by her news and so violent about her not having the baby, that she said she would have it anyway – whether he married her or not. So then he said that they might have to wait, but would get married in the end and she had been happy again – and then, she did not know how it happened, her mother found out that she was pregnant, and when Angela said it didn’t matter, that he was going to marry her as soon as he got a divorce, her mother actually went and saw him. But she did not know this until after their meeting. He never meant to marry you, her mother said: he has a wife and children: he would not think of leaving them: he only said what he did because he was terribly worried about you.
They had had one meeting: she had wanted him to come to her bed-sitter in Notting Hill Gate, but he had refused – said he would meet her in Kensington Gardens by the Peter Pan statue. ‘Supposing it’s pouring with rain?’ she said (this was on the telephone). ‘It won’t be,’ he had replied.
It wasn’t. It was one of those tremulously balmy September mornings, with a pale blue sky and soft yellow sunlight that had no warmth. The trees were turning and the grass, now that they had taken away all the small railings that had edged every path to use the iron for the war effort, looked very green and faintly crisp from an early frost. She knew she would arrive too early and walked, as slowly as she could bear to, from Lancaster Gate station on the path nearest the Serpentine lake. In spite of everything that had happened, she could not help feeling excited and happy at the prospect of seeing him, and during this walk she moved from being afraid – from dreading – what he might be going to say to her, to wondering what he might say, and eventually to imagining what he might say which, of course, miraculously became what she wanted to hear. I shall remember this day all my life, she thought, and, more dramatically, I am walking towards my fate. Their difference in age did not matter (he had said that right at the beginning), he would drink less, she was sure, if he was happier which she was certain he would be with her. If he did not want children, she would not have any. She would do exactly what he wanted, because she wanted to do that.
He was late, but only a few minutes. She saw him coming – along the same path that she had walked – but she forced herself to remain on the bench until he was very near, when she could not help springing to her feet.
She wanted to fly into his arms, but he kissed her cheek, a most non-committal kiss, and suggested they sit.
From the moment that he began to speak – making it clear that the meeting was for him an ordeal – her heart, which had seemed almost in her throat, began to sink, heavily, coldly, in her breast.
He said how difficult it was for him to say the things he had to say. He said he was entirely to blame. He said that he had been carried away – he made that sound as though this was a faintly disgusting, contemptible thing to have been. He said that his wife had been made very unhappy by the affair – she knew, he interrupted her, because he had told her. She had been wonderful about it all, had entirely understood how it had all come about and was prepared to forgive him for the sake of their marriage and their children. He was too old for Angela, and she was so young, at the beginning of her life, that she was bound to find some really nice young man who would be worthy of her (there were fearful echoes here of Rupert, who now seemed so distant, so long ago). He was not going to see her again: he had promised her mother – and then that came out. The shock and humiliation of this – of being discussed as though she was a child, by his wife and her mother was too much and anger suddenly animated the paralysed stupor with which she had listened until then. How dared he go and see her mother behind her back! she’d said. She had come to see him, he replied. Pride forbade her asking him how her mother could have known about it, if not from him. Afterwards she recognised that he lied by not saying things: he had rung her mother up, and then her mother had gone to see him. He told her that he had arranged for her to have an audition for the announcing job, and when she said she didn’t want it, he had urged her at least to try for it. ‘You need something interesting to do now,’ he had said. ‘The alternative is that you will be called up to do God knows what.’ Then he had said how much he admired her courage and that he was taking his wife on a short holiday which he felt was badly needed. He had told her to take care of herself – looked as though he was going to kiss her cheek again, but she turned her face away – touched her hands, a sort of apologetic pat, as she said to herself afterwards, got up from the bench and walked quickly away without looking back. Or at least she did not think he looked back, again her pride prevented her from watching him walk away, one glance had been enough.
She felt utterly betrayed, but the devilish thing was that she still could not think of him without longing. She did not ‘respect’ him as she put it; at times she was even able to dislike him, but some part of her hung on to how they had been before all this had happened and longed to go back to it.
She had got the job because she had not really cared whether she did or not, had had no nerves, was calm and cool and collected. She had trailed other announcers for a week and learned the job and then begun. It was two months now since that meeting and she got through the days and nights somehow. Everything, excepting the job, was an extraordinary and pointless effort – travelling, feeding herself, making any small decision, talking to other people. She slept and slept – getting up in the afternoons was always hard, and on her days off she didn’t bother sometimes to get up at all.
She had seen him once in the two months – getting into a taxi outside the building. He had not seen her, and she stood and watched him be driven away. She noticed that her heart was aching but it wasn’t until the sight of him gave her a little lilt to her spirits, which relapsed as soon as the cab was out of sight, that she realised that it had been aching all the time.
By now she had shown her pass in the hall, taken a lift, which had carried her four floors down, and was walking along the stuffy, soundproofed corridors to her studio. It was good manners to arrive on shift a bit early, so that the other announcer could leave on time. She arrived in the middle of a recorded concert. ‘I’ve logged the records,’ her predecessor said. ‘Phew! I’m glad to be going home. Our boiler broke down yesterday, and Martin’s got flu, I think, and the roof’s been leaking ever since the bomb fell in the next street.’ Her name was Daphne Middleton and she was married to a producer who worked in Broadcasting House. They did not really know each other, as Daphne’s shift had only recently been moved to the one before Angela’s. As Daphne gathered up her things, she said, ‘By the way, you don’t happen to know anyone who wants a room, do you? My lodger’s suddenly given notice. Martin’s miserable – she was rather a glamour puss, and I’m relieved, but we do need the money.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Oh, well. Have to ask everyone. She’s not going f
or a month. She’s got a week’s leave and guess who she’s spending it with! That producer Brian Prentice. He’s married, you know. Aren’t some men the end! God – I must fly. You’ll have to kick those JPEs awake – they’re very slow off the mark.’
Coincidence. She supposed all coincidences must seem extraordinary to their victims, but although for a second she had wondered if it had been malice – if Daphne had known about her and Brian – she knew that it wasn’t. She had never spent a week with him, she had told nobody, and she knew that he would not. Until then she had thought that she could not be more unhappy, but the job, continuous, demanding – she must never let there be more than fifteen seconds of dead air in case the Germans picked it up and used it – saved her. By six thirty the following morning, when she came off shift, she felt bitterness and rage, but she was out of love. It was still a desert, but she was free in it. She discovered that she was desperately hungry, and went to the canteen where she had a dried egg omelette, some tomatoes and a piece of bacon.
‘Mrs Cripps made you this.’ She put the steaming mug down on the small table beside the sofa. He looked up at her; he had been staring at his hands placed on the rug in front of him.
‘Christopher,’ she said gently. ‘It’s Polly. It’s me.’
‘I know.’ Tears began to course down his face. He often cried like this, making no sound, for what seemed like hours. When he was not crying, his eyes had a hunted expression; he looked haunted, very scared of something, but nobody knew what. To begin with she had thought that the best thing was to take no notice, to be gently cheerful and to talk to him as though he was the old Christopher, but she found this very hard since his unreachable despair; or whatever it was, made her want to cry too. Then she had tried to encourage him to cry more – to cry out whatever was locking him up. But nothing made any difference.
He had been picked up by Military Police in Felixstowe: they had thought he was a young deserter, a soldier who had gone AWOL. But then they had discovered that he did not seem to know where he was – did not even remember his name. They had gone through his clothes and found his surname on a Cash’s name tape on his vest so, in time, his identity had been discovered. Raymond and Jessica had travelled together to the hospital where he was and it was clear that he recognised his father since he made an effort to get out of bed and escape, but he was so weak that he collapsed on the floor of the ward. They had had to give their permission for him to have electric shock treatment, and after a month in the hospital, he had been sent to Home Place to convalesce. The Duchy was extremely fond of him, and Jessica, who now came down every weekend, was grateful to have him out of London in a place that she knew he loved.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 95