But he didn’t seem to love it much, Polly thought sadly. He did not love anything. He sat on the lawn, on fine days, heavily wrapped up in front of a bird table that the Duchy had had moved there for him. He did watch them feeding sometimes, and once, when a robin chased the others away, he smiled. But most of the time he cried. Dr Carr came, but he was frightened of Dr Carr.
‘I think it’s doctors he’s afraid of,’ Aunt Rach said.
‘I think it’s men,’ Aunt Villy had answered, and Polly, who had heard this, was beginning to agree with her.
When it was too cold for him to be out, which it now usually was, they put him in the drawing room. The Duchy, who did not generally allow the drawing-room fire to be lit until an hour before dinner, had it lit in the morning for his benefit, as she said it would give people the excuse to keep popping in to make it up, but it was still cold. He wore a polo-neck jersey that had belonged to Rupert – a kind of indigo blue that sadly matched the deep circles under his eyes. Villy shaved him every other day. Sometimes, in the afternoon, Clary and Polly took him for short walks round the garden. He went obediently with them and they talked to each other, trying to make conversations that he might feel constrained to join, but his contributions were mainly a nervous agreement. He tried to eat some of whatever was put before him. Then, one weekend Hugh brought down a dog – a large black and white mongrel with a good deal of Border Collie in him, middle-aged, that had been found waiting and dazed outside a completely bombed house near the wharf. ‘See what that does,’ he said to Polly. ‘You know he always loved animals.’
‘Oh, Dad, that is a good idea!’ She and Clary gave the dog a bath, which improved his appearance a lot, and then took him in to Christopher.
‘This dog has been terribly frightened by the blitz,’ Polly said; she somehow knew that this would get his attention. He looked at the dog standing stock still a few yards away, and the dog looked back at him. Then it walked slowly up to him and sat, leaning heavily against his legs. Somebody slammed a door and the dog began to shiver. Christopher put out his hand and laid it on the dog’s head and the dog gazed at him and slowly stopped shivering.
‘What a lovely dog!’ Lydia exclaimed the next morning. ‘What’s he called?’
‘Oliver,’ Christopher said.
‘Is he your dog?’
‘Yes. He is now.’
‘Darling, you are a brilliant man!’ Sybil said. ‘We none of us thought of that.’
‘Well, he sort of fell into view, poor creature. He’s terribly nervous: can’t stand aeroplanes or loud noises. I just thought they might do each other good.’ If only I could give you a dog, and you would get well, he thought looking at her yellowing face, her swollen belly and ankles as she lay on the bed.
‘Shall I bring you a spot of lunch up here?’ he said. ‘I could bring mine too, have it with you.’
‘Oh, no, darling, I’m just being lazy.’ And he had to watch her hoist herself off the bed and wander to the dressing-table where she struggled to put up her hair.
‘Sybil! Darling!’ He took a deep breath and was ready to plunge into the deep end of truth.
She turned nervously to face him. ‘What?’ She sounded so defensive, that he lost courage.
‘I was wondering’, he said, ‘what you would look like if you cut your hair off. It might make an exciting change.’
‘I thought you always liked it long.’
‘Well, I did, but I can change my mind, can’t I?’
It would be less tiring for her, he thought. So Villy carefully cut it off which was a great relief to Sybil. She made him stay to decide how short it was to be, and the ground became thick with the long tresses before Villy did the trimming.
Thinking himself unseen, he sneaked a lock from the floor and concealed it, but they both saw him, Villy with compassion, and Sybil with fear, but since she could not stand him knowing, she determined that he did not.
Polly knew though. Since nobody talked about it, she bore her knowledge alone. She was afraid to talk of it, and every week that passed seemed to make this more difficult. She would not talk to her father for fear of burdening him with more misery – anxiety about how she was feeling. She could not talk to her mother, because she felt it would betray him. She did not talk to Clary, because she felt Clary had enough to bear as it was. Everybody else preserved such a bland and consistently cheerful air that she did not know how to approach them. She distracted herself by trying to look after Christopher, who did seem to be slowly on the mend. Since Oliver had appeared, he had begun to stop crying, and Oliver never left his side. Indeed, this was what started Christopher going for walks unattended: Oliver needed exercise, he said. He could be seen wandering round the big meadow, throwing an old tennis ball for Oliver, who was tireless in his enjoyment of this. So, in a way, he did not need her so much. She struggled through each day of getting up in the freezing cold, having breakfast, doing lessons, spending some time with Christopher and her mother, doing her homework, ironing and mending her clothes or minding Wills and Roly for Ellen. The present seemed grey; the future black. She lived in a haze of dread.
One bleak November afternoon Miss Milliment, going to the schoolroom to fetch the Greek primer to set homework for Clary, came in, switched on the light, and discovered Polly seated at the table. She leapt to her feet.
‘I haven’t done the blackout,’ she said, and Miss Milliment could tell from her voice that she had been crying. She turned off the light, and waited while Polly pulled down the blinds. The small paraffin stove had either been turned off or gone out: it was bitterly cold.
‘Isn’t this rather a cold place to spend the afternoon?’ she asked. Polly had gone back to the table and muttered something about not noticing it.
Miss Milliment said, ‘I feel something is worrying you very much,’ and she sat down at the table opposite Polly.
There was a silence, during which Polly looked at her and she looked back steadily. Then she burst out, ‘I’m sick of being treated like a child! I’m absolutely sick of it!’
‘Yes, I think it must be very tiresome. Particularly at a time when you are ceasing to be one. People always say’, she went on, after a pause, ‘how wonderful it must be to be young, but I fear that most of them have forgotten what it was like. I found it quite dreadful myself.’
‘Did you, Miss Milliment?’
‘Fortunately, whether people like it or not, they grow older. And you will do that. You will get past this tiresome, interim stage and they will have to acknowledge that you are grown-up.’
She waited, and then offered gently, ‘It will pass. Nothing lasts for ever.’
But Polly, looking away from her, said, ‘One thing does. It lasts for ever and ever. Death.’
Her quiet and certain despair exposed a depth of misery that both moved and shocked Miss Milliment. She said, half hoping that it might be so, ‘Are you thinking of your uncle?’
‘You know I am not.’
‘Yes, my dear Polly, I do. Forgive me.’
‘It isn’t—’ her voice trembled, ‘it isn’t just that they don’t talk to me about it. They don’t talk to each other. They go on pretending to each other that it isn’t happening! It makes everything they say a kind of lie. And it must be especially hard for my mother when she feels so rotten all the time – and getting – getting worse. It is my father’s fault! He ought to start it, so that she can really say what she is feeling. At least, if I was dying – that’s what I would want.’ Tears were streaming down her face now, but she ignored them. ‘I think it’s wicked and wrong.’
‘I agree with you about what you would want if you were dying. I think it is what I would want too.’ (For an ignoble moment the thought flashed through Miss Milliment’s mind that when that time came for her there would be no one either to lie to her or to discuss the truth.) ‘But you see,’ she said, ‘we are not either of them. However much we care for other people, we cannot become them. People can only do as much as they are. It may
be more than we could do, it may be less, but very often it will be different. Sometimes that is very hard to bear, as I know you know.’
‘But I have to pretend with them too!’
‘Then you will know how hard it must be for your father.’
Then she added: ‘When a person is dying, it must be their choice how they do it. Didn’t we agree on that, just now? You are not pretending to yourself, and when you remember that, remember that they are not pretending either. To themselves. What they are doing with each other is only and entirely their business.’
Polly looked at the small grey eyes that were watching her with such perceptive kindness and felt known – a warm, light feeling. ‘What you are saying is,’ she said slowly, ‘that I mustn’t judge other people by my standards – by how I am.’
‘It always seems to get in the way of love, don’t you find?’ Miss Milliment said it as though Polly would have thought of this first. ‘Judgement’s rather a tarnisher in my experience,’ she finished. A small smile twitched her little mouth and then disappeared into her chins. ‘Now, Polly, I think you should go somewhere warmer. But before you go, would you help me find the Greek primer? The binding is dark green, but the writing on the spine has faded so much that I am unable to read it on the shelf.’
When Polly had found it, Miss Milliment said, ‘I am grateful for your confidence. I need hardly say that I shall never betray it.’
So she didn’t have to ask her not to talk to other people.
Louise sat in her dressing room (shared with one other girl) with her dressing gown over her shoulders – it was cold – the room with its concrete floor and its cracked basin and its small curtainless window always had a faint smell of damp. She had turned on all the dressing-table lights because they gave some warmth. She was between shows, and writing to Michael.
‘Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon’ she’d put at the top of the paper.
Darling Michael
It was lovely to get your letter so soon after I got here. In fact it was waiting for me. I’m sorry you haven’t got enough guns – or not the kind you want – in your destroyer – that must be awful. I suppose the people who give out the guns are never in a destroyer, so they don’t really know what would be most useful.
(That was rather good: it sounded interested, and as though she had thought about it. Actually, his letters were so full of naval stuff that she found them rather boring: she wanted him to write more about his feelings – and, of course, how he felt about her. He always did a bit, but only a sentence or two after pages about Oerlikon guns or the weather – always awful – or what his captain was like.)
Well! It feels quite grand to have got here at all, but it isn’t at all how I imagined. To begin with, the theatre seems enormous, and there are whole pockets of seats where people can’t hear a word whatever you do about it. The average age of the company – including me – I have worked out is sixty-nine. That’s because two of the actors are in their eighties, and the youngest one is forty-seven! The younger actors have all been called up, I suppose. There are only three women in the company, one quite old, and one sort of middling. It’s the winter season – they don’t do Shakespeare, worse luck. I am the ingénue – ugh! I have an awful part. I’m called Ethyl. The play is called His Excellency The Governor and Bay played the hero when he was young a million years ago, and Ethyl was played by his wife. So that is who I am opposite, but the whole idea of being in love with someone quite so decrepit is ridiculous. I have awful lines like ‘my hero!’ in it, and I wear evening dress nearly all the time – pale blue chiffon – and there are no funny lines at all – I mean on purpose. It is funny by mistake all the time. Anyway, they are quite kind to me except that some of the men upstage me rather a lot. My digs are on the edge of the town kept by an old retired stage hand and his daughter Doll. He gets awfully drunk on Friday nights and swears in Shakespeare: he actually called me a cream-faced loon last week and turned me out of the house. But Doll said to wait in the street for a bit and she’d let me in again. I have ‘dinner’ – lunch – with them. Nearly always stuffed sheep’s heart and greens and potatoes and thick brown gravy, but it’s the only proper meal and I eat it all. Otherwise there is a very genteel tearoom where doughnuts cost FOURPENCE each and they are tiny (though delicious). But I get paid two pounds ten on a rehearsal week, and five pounds when we are playing and my digs cost thirty shillings so I have to be careful. There are hotels, of course, but they have only got five-shilling meals which are out of the question. [She was so hungry nearly all the time, that it was difficult not to write about food.] Occasionally, Bay takes me home to his flat where his wife, who doesn’t act any more, gives us a wonderful high tea with meat paste sandwiches and rock cakes and once a boiled egg.
Here she paused. It did not seem a good idea to tell him about the difficulties of getting home at night after the performance when she had to choose between being followed by a pair of Czech officers – there were a lot of them billeted near Stratford and they were working in pairs reputed to rape girls – or being pawed by one of the elderly actors who offered to walk her home.
My room at the digs is quite small, dominated by a large, creaky double bed with a very thin mattress and one of those eiderdowns that slip off the bed all night. When I get back I sit in it wearing a lot of clothes because there isn’t any heating and write my play or learn lines. The river is nice, with swans on it, and sometimes we rehearse in the bar, which has a terrace looking out on it.
She read the letter so far.
Upstaging [she then wrote] is when the person you’re talking to moves further and further upstage (away from the audience) so that you either have to move up too, or speak all your lines with your back to the audience. The old actors do it all the time – to make people notice them, I suppose. One of them used to do a lot of music hall, so when he rehearses he doesn’t say his lines properly at all, simply gabbles them in a monotonous undertone. He is rather a fat man, and when he isn’t on, he keeps going to sleep on three chairs.
I wonder when you will get some leave, and whether I shall see you? I am only here for three plays. They might keep me on, but I don’t think so. So I shall just have to go home [she nearly put, ‘and be made to do some boring job for the war’ but she wasn’t quite sure how much he was on her side about that so she ended] and learn to do something useful.
Have you read any Ibsen? [she went on] I have been reading Rosmersholm and The Doll’s House. He really did understand what a rotten time women used to have – not allowed professions or careers. His language is so modern that I didn’t realise what a long time ago he wrote – well fairly long. What made me think of it was that his plays, which caused a scandal when they were first performed in this country, by the way, don’t seem to have made much difference to people like my aunts and mother. I actually met the old man who first staged him – and Shaw. He lives with a fierce housekeeper in a rather nice broken-down house. He is called Alfred Waring, but he was too deaf and shaky to have a long conversation with, and I could see the housekeeper didn’t like me being there so I only stayed half an hour. I told you because that’s how I know about people objecting to Ibsen. Quite different from Shaw. I should think he wanted people to object to him.
Well [she was suddenly terribly sleepy] – I think I’d better stop now as this is far too long. And rather dull, I’m afraid. Much love, Louise.
At the bottom of the page, she added:
If you do get leave in the near future, you could come and stay in an hotel here. I could easily book you a room.
Then she wished she hadn’t put that because if he was going to see her act in a real theatre, she wanted it to be a better part than rotten old Ethyl.
The letters she wrote to Stella were quite different. In them she discussed in some detail the relative merits of being pawed by awful leathery old men with bad breath or systematically raped on the towpath by young Czechs, not, presumably, understanding a word they said. She did t
his because the whole thing frightened her rather – after all, it was six nights a week and even with the Double Summer Time being kept on in winter, it was dark by five, after which the streets in Stratford became extremely, and disquietingly, quiet.
You’re frightened [Stella wrote back] and I don’t blame you. The trouble is that you must keep the doors open with the old lechers, because one evening, you might really need one of them. I should learn a few blistering things to say in Czech, just to be on the safe side – if there is one! Oh, poor Louise! It’s this disreputable profession you’ve chosen. Actresses used to be fair game for everyone, and as a lot of Europe is behind us in social mores, I expect the Czechs still think they are. Shall I come and see you? Could I share your large creaky bed, as I’m very short of cash? My father equates lack of money with strength of character – in other people, of course.
And before Louise could even write back saying how lovely, do come, she arrived, without warning, at the stage door after an evening show.
‘I haf komm to take you to ze river path to do unspeakable things,’ she said.
‘Oh, Stella! Oh, how gorgeous! Oh, you are marvellous to come! Come down to my dressing room while I change.’
‘Don’t you die of cold in your deb’s chiffon?’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 96