The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  ‘What a shame!’ She was thrilled.

  ‘A shame it is. I wouldn’t like to tell you what she’s done. I really wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be fit for your ears.’

  In the end he told her all the same. About George (although not in detail what had happened on that dreadful day, not the throwing of his clothes into the street) – about his going home and finding George there. ‘And you remember I got that letter,’ he said.

  She nodded, so vigorously that a kirby-grip fell onto her plate and she covered it instantly with a wrinkled, dimpled hand.

  ‘Well, that was from a solicitor. She wants a divorce. She wants to marry that bloke. And she wants to keep the house.’

  ‘Well, I never! You’ve no call for the house though, have you?’

  He thought of all the years of service that had paid for it. A home of his own, he’d called it. In reality it had been nothing of the kind.

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said slowly but his voice trembled and it was then that she could see that he’d been through a lot of distress: being bossed about by that London tart, she guessed and possibly her boy-friend as well. It was too bad, she thought: look at his little scrawny neck and his sad eyes, and his legs were all bandy in his gaiters – he was just the kind to get bullied …

  ‘It would mean’, he said, with difficulty, ‘that I wouldn’t have much to offer.’

  ‘Offer,’ she repeated: she was so delighted by what she thought he might mean that she wanted to be sure she hadn’t got him wrong.

  ‘I was hoping’, he said, ‘that we could have come to an understanding.’ There was a pause, while they both waited for the other one to say something. She won.

  ‘I am in no position,’ he said, floundering, ‘I have no call to say anything seeing as I am, as you might say, a married man. But this letter has cast a new hue on the situation. All the same it wouldn’t be right for me to ask you – on the one hand I wouldn’t want you to think of me as a bigamist—’

  ‘I should hope not,’ she said: she hadn’t the slightest idea what a bigamist was, but it sounded very nasty to her.

  ‘But, on the other hand, there’s no knowing how long lawyers take over these things?’ He ended almost as though he was asking her.

  ‘They take their own time, no doubt,’ she said. She had never in her life had anything to do with a lawyer, and was unclear what they were for except that she could now see they had something to do with divorce – a thing which so far as she knew was only gone in for by film stars and other people with time on their hands. But she did know what an understanding was. It was the next best thing to an engagement.

  ‘I have always thought of you as a fine woman, a real woman,’ he said gazing respectfully at her bust.

  She could stand it no longer. ‘Frank, if you’re asking me to have an understanding with you – I don’t mind if I do.’

  He went suddenly dark pink, and his eyes watered. ‘Mabel – if I may—’

  ‘Silly,’ she interrupted. ‘What else could you call me?’

  To begin with Sybil was hardly able to believe it – she told herself that she had simply had an unusually good night’s sleep, or that the cold weather was making her hungrier. But after a week of not feeling sick at all, and her back only aching if she tried to pick up Wills or carry him anywhere, she had to believe it. She still felt weak and tired easily, but otherwise she felt as though she was perceptibly recovering. People did: she was sure that really wanting to must make a difference, and, heaven knows, she had prayed that she might get better – for Hugh, for the children, particularly for Wills. For as she well knew, losing your mother when you were as small as that was too soon. He would not remember her. Would not have remembered her, she repeated silently.

  It was Friday, and the thought of Hugh arriving in the evening had a completely different feeling about it. She was looking forward to him seeing her. She would be very careful all day, have a rest after lunch, and then Polly would bring her the life-saving very weak tea. At her worst, she had craved hot water with a slice of lemon in it, but there were no lemons. But in this last week she had halved her dose of the pills and this, too, made her feel more alert. She would still spend ages putting rouge on her face, and then rubbing it off until she considered that Hugh would not notice that it was rouge, and then put on her newest dress that she had made (she could not bear anything tight round her waist and had taken to keeping her stockings up by twisting a shilling in the top until it was tight round her leg). She wished it were summer, because then she could have gone for little walks with Hugh, but even if there was sun, it was too cold for her to enjoy being out at all. Sometimes Villy took her to Battle in the car for a little outing, but that had been happening less and less often. The house was too cold for her and only a constant supply of hot-water bottles enabled her to get through some days – even in bed.

  But now, she said to herself, as she parted her bobbed hair on the other side to see if it looked better, I shall start going for short walks in the weekdays – a little further each day, and when I’ve got up to half an hour, I shall tell him I’d like him to take me for a walk. He’ll be so surprised!

  It was morning, and she had woken really wanting to know what sort of day it was. When she had first realised, or thought that she had known, that she was going to die – she had become obsessed with the weather, the season – it had been the end of summer. She had watched the summer flowers dying away; fewer roses, phlox and delphinium becoming seed heads, oaks beginning to become bronzed in the weaker sunlight, swallows leaving, the single old apple tree that she could see from her window becoming portentous with rosy fruit, chrysanthemums, red hot pokers, and the white Japanese anemone that the Duchy so loved coming to flower in the crisper air, the hint of frosts glinting on the lawn in the mornings, each sight, she had felt, to be her last of that. She would see no more swallows or roses or new green leaves, or mornings when blackbirds stabbed away at the fallen apples. Before that, and almost immediately she had thought that she had only measurable time left, she had forced herself to make the trip to London to equip Polly with winter clothes and clothes beyond the winter, to last her for the first year at least after Sybil had gone. Rachel had urged her to combine this with a visit to Mr Carmichael who had seemed to her a kind, infinitely experienced and practical man. After he had examined her and said almost nothing, she had asked him first whether there was any hope for her. ‘There is always hope, of course,’ he had said, ‘but I don’t think you should count on it.’ And when, before she had allowed this actually to reach her, she had asked how long she had got, he had said that it was not possible to say – several months, he thought, and as though she was thinking of Simon, he had said, ‘Don’t worry about Christmas. You have a son away at school, haven’t you? If we do the operation, there may be more Christmases,’ and she had only been able to nod. He had given her a prescription with strict instructions about how it should be used, and then, when she had got up to leave, he had come round from his desk, put his hands on her shoulders and said, ‘I’m so sorry, my dear. You asked me, and lying to you would be no kindness. I’ll write to your GP. Your husband—’ He had hesitated and she had interrupted him saying quickly that she did not want him to know – yet, and particularly not to know that she knew. He had looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and then said, ‘I expect you know best.’

  He had told her that she could ring him, and even given her his home number: he had been very kind. It couldn’t be much fun having to tell people that sort of thing, she thought as she walked down the steps of the large Harley Street house and into the hot dusty street. To have to tell people that they might die … and then it hit her: she realised that she hadn’t actually believed it, been able to face the inexorable certainty – her legs had started to give way, and for minutes she held onto the iron railings that flanked the steps. It was then that she realised that she couldn’t face going back on the train with Polly and Villy and behaving as though nothing
had happened. She needed some time alone. She decided to miss the train, and blessed her own foresight that had made her give Polly her train ticket. Then she walked slowly down through the streets until she came to a pub. A drink: that was the thing to have when you had had a shock. But, of course, it was too early: the pubs were not open. Anyway, she thought, I can’t drink drink any more, it made her feel awful, and going into a pub on her own without a man would already be an ordeal; ordering a soft drink would make it worse. She saw a cab and asked it to take her to Charing Cross, but when they reached Piccadilly Circus she saw the News Cinema, paid off the cab and went in. It would be dark and anonymous and she could simply sit for as long as she liked.

  She sat through the Gaumont British News recited in the usual tight-lipped, slightly heroic tones that so lent themselves to heroics and patriotism, as though the news, any news, was designed both to inspire and to soothe the recipients, two cartoons, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, a short film of a munitions factory … and then it was the news again which she hadn’t taken in anyway. She sat there, mindlessly watching blurred newsreel of the blitz, now, the announcer said almost triumphantly, intensifying.

  As she emerged, blinking, into the street looking for another cab, she thought fleetingly of Hugh, making his way from the East End to their desolate house in London, not knowing that she was still in town, not knowing that she was to die. My darling. What can I do to make it less awful for you? Not tell him, she thought, as she climbed stiffly into a cab. Telling him would condemn him to weeks – or months? (it seemed strange not to know which) – of waiting. It would be like standing on a platform, she thought when she was doing that at Charing Cross, waiting and waiting for the train to depart, to say goodbye; she could spare him that, or at least most of it. Her thoughts were very few, and far apart from one another, what happened between them she hardly knew.

  In the train she had fallen asleep.

  This morning she remembered again Mr Carmichael saying ‘there is always hope’. Of course there was, but also, of course, he would not have felt that he could raise her hopes. It was a beautiful morning with white mist and, above it, a sun the colour of pimento. There were lacy icicles on the window panes. Simon would soon be back from school; it would soon be Christmas. She had made Hugh four pairs of socks and a sweater in an impossibly elaborate stitch and for Polly a party dress, in coffee-coloured organdie. The house was filling up with these innocent secrets. Christopher and Polly were making a dolls’ house for Juliet, and Sybil had stitched a minute drawing-room carpet for it in petit point. Polly was growing fast which was probably why she looked so pale. She would take her to see Dr Carr who would give her a tonic. She might even take Simon to Hamley’s in London to choose his present, she thought, shutting the small top casement window, and suddenly remembering standing there, just before Wills was born, with the Albertine rose, ‘look thy last on all things lovely every hour’, and thinking that she might die in labour. But she had survived: it had been that poor little twin who had not lived. Well, she would not think that any more: she was going to get better, to live.

  That evening, after her first dinner downstairs for weeks, when she and Hugh had retired, at his insistence, and she was undressing, Hugh said, ‘Darling, aren’t you tired?’

  ‘Do I look tired?’

  He leaned over her at the dressing table so that she could see him looking at her face in the mirror.

  ‘You look lovely. And serene. Lovely,’ he repeated and put his hand under her hair at the back of her neck. ‘I rather miss your neck.’

  ‘I’ll grow my hair again. But I don’t think long grey hair is awfully attractive, do you?’

  ‘Your hair isn’t grey!’

  ‘One day it will be.’

  He turned her head towards him and kissed her mouth. ‘I’m going to tuck you up now,’ he said at the end of this silent gentleness.

  ‘Oh, Hugh! Hugh! Do you realise how much better I am? I can tell you now. I’ve been feeling awful for so long that I’d begun to think – to be afraid – do you know I even thought that perhaps I might be going to die! Oh!’ She made a little sound between a laugh and a sob. ‘It’s such a relief to tell you. I couldn’t have before, but now – I am so much better! For a week now. Every day!’

  He knelt to put his arms round her and held her as tears of exquisite relief came and slipped away. When she could look at him she saw unfathomable sadness. He shook his head almost irritably. ‘Do you mean you have been feeling all that and not telling me?’

  ‘I couldn’t. Darling, I didn’t want to distress you. And look how right I was. It would have been needless distress.’

  ‘I want you,’ he said, in a voice that steadied as he spoke, I want you to promise me that if you should ever, by any chance, feel anything like that again, you’ll tell me. Don’t keep anything from me.’

  ‘Darling, I don’t. You know I don’t. Excepting that. I couldn’t tell you that I thought I was going to die!’

  ‘Do you really think it would be better for me to know – afterwards – that you’d been through all that by yourself? How would you feel if it was the other way round?’

  ‘Oh, my dear love. If it was you, I’d know – whether you told me or not.’

  She said it with such a certain and tender conviction that he had to dismiss the pain it caused him.

  ‘Well,’ he said doggedly. ‘Promise me now.’

  So she did.

  ‘It occurs to me’, Clary said, ‘that perhaps people on mountains in the Old Testament really got struck by lightning which turned them from being gloomy and hopeless about destiny into quite bossy optimistic people. A sort of electric-shock treatment from God.’

  They were stacking logs in the porch outside the front door and Christopher, who was bringing the logs in a wheelbarrow, had just told them they were doing it all wrong.

  ‘He’s certainly much better,’ Polly said. ‘But it must be a most frightening treatment. Strapped down on a bed thing and being given shocks.’

  ‘Has he told you about it? I ought to know.’

  ‘He said he felt so awful that at first he didn’t really care. And afterwards he had the most terrific headache but also a tremendous feeling of relief. But after a few treatments, he started to dread them.’

  ‘He is better, though. He hasn’t cried for ages.’

  ‘That’s Oliver. Clever Dad for getting him. The trouble is, he’s beginning to dread what will happen to him when he is quite better.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He’s afraid his father will get him sent back to the aerodrome to go on levelling ground for runways or, worse, make him join the Army.’

  ‘I don’t think the Army will take him. Not after all that treatment.’

  ‘You don’t know, Clary. And now Uncle Raymond’s working in some grand hush-hush establishment, he’s probably got a fiendish amount of influence.’

  ‘That won’t make any difference. Louise says that one of the actors in Devon couldn’t be called up because he had flat feet! I ask you! If they’re as fussy as that, it’s a wonder they’ve got an army at all.’

  Louise had come back, very run down, as the Duchy put it, and Dr Carr had said her tonsils ought to come out.

  ‘She ought to be helping us.’

  ‘She’s gone with Zoë to the nursing home. I could see her practising to be Florence Nightingale this morning.’

  ‘Do you think she’s in love?’

  ‘With that portrait painter bloke? Haven’t the faintest.’

  ‘She writes to him a lot. She doesn’t want her tonsils out in case he gets leave.’

  ‘That might not be love. You might want to see anyone rather than have your tonsils out. Oh, God! Here come the children.’

  Neville’s school had broken up early because of scarlet fever. ‘I won’t be getting it,’ he informed everybody. ‘I simply loathe the boy who started it all. I loathed him so much I never went within about two miles of him.’

&
nbsp; ‘There aren’t two miles in your school.’ Lydia said. ‘It’s quite a small place really.’ But she and Neville had become friends enough to run a shop together, which sold what Clary and Polly considered to be such awful and boring things that nobody bought them except out of kindness. ‘And I’m running out of that,’ Clary said, ‘quite apart from the cash. How could I possibly want to buy my own last year’s vest – outgrown and holey to boot?’

  Apart from any clothes they could cadge, they sold insects described by Neville as racing beetles, each in its own matchbox where they quickly died, Christmas cards made by themselves, cigarette cards, old toys, empty bottles, relics from the museum long since abandoned, bead necklaces made by Lydia, shampoo, made by immersing slivers of soap in boiling water and poured into old medicine bottles with labels made by Lydia: ‘SHAM POO’ they read ‘for all hairs’. They sold information cards each one having six pieces of information on them. ‘How to put out fires’ – Lydia got that out of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management. ‘Put silver sand into large bottles and store for use’ it read. What to do if chased by a bull: ‘Stand very still and take off anything red you are wearing.’ The grown-ups bought these, and they began to run out of information. The shop was on the first-floor landing, and Polly and Clary thought it a perfect pest. Lydia and Neville crouched there for hours, cajoling, whining, bullying people to buy things. ‘It ought to be against the law,’ Clary said.

  Now they arrived, very sulky, because they’d been told to help with the logs. Luckily Christopher appeared with another load, and said he would take them to load up the next barrow.

  ‘Thanks very, very much,’ Neville said. He was practising sarcasm, but people rather tiresomely continued not to be withered by his efforts.

  The Duchy was in a bad humour. ‘I do not see how everybody is to be fitted in,’ she said. She was making toast for tea in the morning room with Rachel, the great-aunts, Zoë and Louise. The room was very full of people, and the quantity of toast that needed to be made was flustering her.