The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  “Indeed I saw you at once,” he said, “my Good Angel,” and he squeezed her hand again so that her rings hurt. They were sitting in a taxi by then—alone at last.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, full of excitement at the thought of their candlelit supper in some discreet restaurant.

  “Aha! You will see, you will see,” he replied, and she smiled indulgently—he seemed as excited as a boy, or as she was.

  When the taxi stopped and he was paying it off, she recognized that they were in fact in Curzon Street, very near Hermione’s shop, at the entrance to Shepherd Market. It would be too odd, she thought, if he was to take her to the same restaurant where she had had lunch.

  “Give me your darling hand.”

  He led her through the wide arch into a narrow little street—everything was dark—through a doorway that seemed to be open, since he used no key, and up two flights of narrow and steep stairs.

  “Where are you taking me to?” she had said, trying to sound merely curious and amused, but she could hear her voice and it did not sound like either of those things.

  “This is our chance for a little privacy, my angel,” he had answered as he fumbled with a key to a door on the landing they had reached. He switched on the light to reveal a small and cluttered room, its windows covered with blackout blinds, its floor crowded by a table, two chairs and a large divan bed without a cover. The table had two Chianti bottles with candles stuck in them, plates and glasses, there was a gas fire with a meter beside it and, above, a mantelpiece littered with dusty postcards. In one corner she observed a very small sink with an electric water heater, a draining board on which stood various pieces of unwashed crockery. He was busy with matches—lighting the fire and the candles on the table, little drifts of dust spurting from the shaggy carpet as he bustled about.

  She stood uncertainly by the door, where he had relinquished her hand: she felt utterly confused—as though she might be on the brink of being quite out of her depth—with also an element of sheer disappointment. She had imagined a cosy, charming, romantic restaurant for their tête-à-tête, not this squalid little bed-sitting room with its stale and faintly nauseating air, but then he seemed so happy and excited and was almost pathetically doing the hostly honours: he was removing a paper napkin from a plate on the table to reveal a small pie and a pair of tomatoes and then rushing to the draining board by the sink where stood a bottle of wine in a bucket, and as he unwound the wire from the neck of the bottle she realized that it was champagne. Now he was advancing to the table, took out the handkerchief with which he had mopped his brow at the end of the concert and wrapped it round the bottle, “Hold out a glass, dearest, or we may lose some,” and eased the cork till it emerged with a soft thud. “Ha ha!” he cried, as though amazed by his achievement. He filled both glasses to the brim and went down on his knee to hand her one of them. “At last!” he said, gazing at her with an ardent devotion that was both thrilling and familiar.

  “Sit down, dear lady”—he had taken her hand again and was leading her to the divan—“it is more comfortable than those kitchen chairs.”

  He sat beside her. “Here’s to us,” he said huskily. They drank. The champagne, while not actually warm, was far from cold. He had put her at the pillow end of the divan, and she noticed that the sheet and pillow-case were distinctly grey. The thought occurred to her that perhaps he could not afford to take her out to dinner and that this was the best alternative he had been able to provide, and she said how grand it was to have champagne with which to celebrate his first performance that evening. “Our first performance,” he said as he poured them more champagne. As she did not quite understand what he meant—was he going to dedicate The Temptations to her? (an intoxicating thought)—she smiled back at him and agreed when he suggested she should take off her jacket: the room was indeed becoming rather warm. Was he staying here while his wife was in hospital, and how was she, by the way?

  No, no, he wasn’t staying here, he had simply borrowed the place for the evening from a very good friend who was on tour. Mercy was having something done to her sinuses, he added, nothing serious, but they had been causing her trouble.

  “But tonight we can leave all those cares behind us. We are as free as air. Oh, my beloved, if you only knew how much I have been longing for this night! Put down your glass and let me caress you!” and he seized her glass, put it on the floor and taking her head in his hands, proceeded to shower her face with kisses. He began in a romantic manner with her forehead, then her eyes, but when he reached her mouth she began to feel nervous and to fear that he might get carried away.

  “We must be—” she managed to say, but he stopped her with surprisingly muscular lips, at the same time pushing her down so that she was half lying on the bed. “We can have our supper afterwards,” he said.

  Then, at last, and of course, she realized what he was up to—the reason that he had brought her to this awful little room. For suddenly not only the room, but the whole thing seemed awful: there ensued the most unseemly struggle, as she fought him off, sat upright, reminded him of all the responsibilities that they both had to other people, and how they had agreed that there was nothing to be done but endure them. To begin with he had simply responded as though she was shy—coy even, he had suggested (she was not flattered by this suggestion); but when she said that they had always known that their love must be platonic, he retorted that so far as he was concerned, that was simply because they had had no opportunity for anything better. It was not as though they were intending an elopement; he was the first person to see the impracticability of that; therefore a little roll in the hay which nobody would ever know about could surely do no harm? “I love you madly,” he added.

  “I love Edward,” she had answered. This pair of half truths reassured neither of them. He was beginning to take offence, and she—she felt that everything was shattered, degraded from pure, romantic devotion to mere lust. It was disgusting; looking at him now, a little sweaty sulking man—how could she have attributed to him so much nobility and charm?—she felt a kind of confused despair, as she recognized that most of her relationship with him had been conducted in his absence. He was not, could never be the creature of her dreams. Her only desire was to go—to get out of this place.

  He did not make that easy. He alternated offers of food and more drink with oblique accusations—nothing in her behaviour could possibly have led him to suppose that she did not like him—and, worse, kept reverting to the light-hearted romp theme. This both wounded and incensed her: the idea that she should ever be the object of somebody’s passing fancy was so offensively at odds with the idea of her own nature, that she found it suddenly easy to get to her feet, announce her departure and refuse to allow him to see her to a cab.

  It took her some time to find her way out of Shepherd Market which, though dark, seemed to be full of subterranean clubs, tarts placed at as regular intervals as lamp-posts, snatches of distant singing with the surging crescendos that implied drunkenness. It was very cold, the streets were full of sudden corners—the other side of one of them she nearly ran into a pair of American officers who had stopped to light cigarettes which was how she saw what they were.

  “Excuse me, lady,” one of them said. “Would you care for a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” she replied, and then something made her add, “I’m looking for a taxi,” whereupon one of them said, “Brad! Let’s find the lady a taxi.”

  And they did. Walked her to Green Park, waited with her until an empty cab came along, hailed it and put her in.

  “Thank you very much,” she said; she wanted to cry then from this unexpected kindness.

  “Enjoy your ride.” They stood watching, she saw, as she drove away.

  In the cab she prayed that Hugh would have gone to bed, or that, as it was so early, he had not yet come home. But, of course, he was there, anxious to give her a drink and enquire after her evening, to talk to her about the next step in Polly’s edu
cation. It was midnight before she was able to plead fatigue and escape to bed where she thought that after all the whisky she would mercifully just pass out, and this happened, but all too briefly: she woke to find that she had slept a mere two hours. The whisky after champagne on an empty stomach had done their worst: she had a raging thirst, her head ached, and when she put on the light and staggered down the stairs to the bathroom waves of nausea overcame her and she was painfully sick. Humiliation succeeded the nausea, and she sat shivering in bed, sipping water and miserably going over every detail of the ghastly evening. Of course she blamed him more, for flirting with her and calling it love; for being such a cheap little sham, as she put it. “A roll in the hay—a little fun on the quiet—harmless fun,” as though making love to her would be of no consequence to either of them! He whom she had thought understood and appreciated her so well, had really had no more regard for her than he clearly had for any woman he thought might be available. She cried—with difficulty since she also felt so angry and humiliated. For months she had lived in a dream world inhabited by this secret life which she had been able to enjoy because its consummation had been out of the question. The private conviction from which she had always suffered, that her life was some kind of tragedy since the essential element had been missing, returned to her now in all its dreary familiar force. To be mutually in love and to have to renounce it was one thing; to discover that the frightful disparity of their feelings for each other precluded what she thought of as love was another. It was clear now that he had felt merely lust, a sensation that she recognized as a weakness common to many men, but which had never meant anything at all to her.

  The idea that he should expect her to take off her clothes and lie in that bed with its squalid, anonymously used sheets kept recurring, filling her with a kind of enraged shame. Why had she not realized when she walked into that awful little room what he intended? It was true, of course, that he had agreed with her that their feelings for one another could never “come to anything,” but lurking in the back of her mind was the embarrassing fact that this had only been mentioned once, on the day that they had had tea together at Charing Cross and he had accompanied her part of the way home on the train; all other allusions to it had occurred during her imaginary conversations with him. This was the hardest part to bear since it made her feel such a fool …

  At least, she thought, as the train rumbled slowly out of Charing Cross and over the river, nobody need ever know; it could hardly have been an episode that he would wish to recount to anybody.

  “I kept you up too late,” Hugh had said at breakfast (tea and toast that he had burned, rather, under the grill and the bright yellow margarine that Mrs. Cripps used only for cooking at home). “I’m afraid the marmalade has run out.”

  At the station, he tucked one of her dress boxes under his arm and carried her case with his good hand. “Tell Sybil that I’ll be down tomorrow evening,” he had said as the train began to move. Then he had smiled his very sweet, rather melancholy smile and added, “And bless you for all your nursing.”

  This tribute brought tears to her eyes. At least I am of some use, she thought, as the contrast between how she had felt coming over this same bridge yesterday and how she felt now overcame her.

  Lydia came with Tonbridge to the station to meet her. “I wanted to be the first person to see you,” she said. “Goodness, Mummy! You do look tired! Did you have a lovely time?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Well, if you ask me, pleasure doesn’t seem to agree with you. You looked much better before you went.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. I just had rather a bad night.”

  “Anyway, I’m terrifically pleased you’re back.”

  She was moved. Here was another person who needed her. “You’ll be saying in a minute that nothing at home’s the same without me,” she said.

  But Lydia instantly replied, “It’s the same. I’m not.”

  Clary

  Summer, 1942

  “Don’t you think, Archie, that politicians particularly say very silly things? I mean, nobody would think for a moment that you’d train people to play tiddlywinks—certainly not millions of grown-up American men. I have my doubts about public utterances generally. They are a bit like shouting something boring to extremely deaf people, aren’t they?”

  It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she didn’t want him to think that she didn’t know about conversation—particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiled and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.

  “But, then, Harry Hopkins is a very unserious name for a politician, isn’t it? He sounds much more like somebody from Ridgways Late Joys.”

  “He does, indeed. That was fun, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes! It was. Was it really like Victorian music hall?”

  “Well, even I am not old enough to have been to that, but yes, I think it’s probably a fair imitation. Who did you like best, Poll?”

  She thought, and a strawberry fell off her spoon, but not into her lap like it would have with me, Clary thought, just onto her plate again.

  “I am so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun,” Polly said. “I thought Nuna Davey was wonderful and it was a really funny song.”

  “We have a rather ghastly cousin who wanted to be a nun once,” Clary informed him. She had spilled strawberry ice-cream—that went with the strawberries—down the front of her dress just above where her napkin was, of course, and before that, during the hors d’oeuvres, a bit of Bismarck herring had slid off her fork and landed on a different bit of the plain dark blue velveteen that Polly had advised her to wear: “You look your best in plain things,” she had said, but it was now unplain in a most unfortunate way. She found it very difficult to think and talk and eat at the same time, and whereas at home one could do these things in comfortable turn, out to dinner in a posh restaurant she felt one was meant to manage all three. But I just haven’t had the practice, she thought.

  “I thought Leonard Sachs was marvellous, too. Making things up to say all the time, and answering people back and being funny. I should like to go every night.”

  “But since she’s been nursing, she’s reputedly fallen in love with a frightfully wounded patient, and of course if she marries him, being a nun will be out of the question.” She gave Polly a severe glance for changing the subject. Polly smiled apologetically and stroked her hair. They had both had perms—their first—when Archie had invited them to London. Polly’s had been a terrific success, Clary thought: she had set it in a thick page-boy bob with a delicate little fringe curling round her forehead, but hers had gone into awful ripples like a cheap doll’s and she hated it. It was funny: she had never minded about anything like that before. She looked up from her plate, and found Archie regarding her.

  “I suppose you feel I’ve changed the subject,” she said, “but you didn’t seem awfully interested in American politics.”

  “Let’s not talk about the war,” Polly said. “People do all the time and it doesn’t make it any better. One of the reasons why we wanted to see you without the children was that we wanted to have a very serious conversation with you.”

  She agreed with this. “And it would have been impossible with them.”

  “Of course, Simon isn’t exactly a child, but he’s away at school. Anyway, his interests are different. But Neville and Lydia …” Polly left their hopeless immaturity to his imagination.

  “It would have been simply a children’s outing, and we take them on those,” Clary finished. “It’s absolutely no fun for us, I can tell you.”

  “Right,” Archie said. “Let me just order the coffee and then we shan’t be interrupted. Would anybody like a Grand Marnier?”

  “Yes, please,” they both said, and then Clary added, “You see, a case in point. If you’d offered us that in front of them there would
have been an awful rumpus with them saying it wasn’t fair and why couldn’t they have one when, of course, they are far too young.”

  “Far too,” Polly agreed.

  When the coffee and liqueurs had arrived, and Archie had offered them both a cigarette, which they both refused—Polly because she had promised her father not to smoke until she was twenty-one, and Clary because she had tried one and need never try one again—Polly said, “You explain, Clary, you’re far better at it than me.”

  So she told him how it was felt that they were getting too old simply to do lessons any more with Miss Milliment, but that although there was general agreement about that, there was no agreement at all about the alternative. “The Duchy thinks we could perfectly well stay at home and help with the children and have French lessons with a ghastly person who lives quite near whose breath smells and who laughs at absolutely everything, and Aunt Villy and Aunt Rachel think we should go to the same cooking place that Louise went to to learn cooking and household management when neither of us is in the least interested in any of that, and Polly’s father thinks we should learn shorthand and typing so that we can be useful when we’re called up, and Miss Milliment thinks that we ought to work frightfully hard and try to get into a university—at least that’s something she wished she’d done, instead of like the others, just making us do things they’ve had to do, and Aunt Dolly thinks we ought to get married to some nice man—” She started to giggle. “I ask you! Of course, she only got asked what she thought out of politeness …” She had run out of people, “and that’s what they all think,” she finished.