The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She opened her mouth to say that she didn’t want them immediately—now—and shut it again. His voice had sounded teasing—he wasn’t serious.

  But the subject was resumed at Hatton. She got the curse when they had been there four days, and although Zee didn’t talk to her directly, this resulted in various messages. She had fairly bad stomach cramps, and Michael was very kind to her, tucking her up in bed with a hot-water bottle after lunch.

  “You are sweet to me,” she said, after he had bent down to kiss her.

  “You are my little darling wife. By the way, Zee told me one useful tip. When you’re OK again, after we’ve made love, it helps if you prop your legs up with a pillow. It gives the sperm a better chance to meet an egg.”

  She swallowed: the thought that he had been discussing all this with his mother suddenly nauseated her.

  “Michael—I’m not at all sure that I want to have a baby so quickly. I mean, I do want them in the end, but I want to get a bit more used to being married first.”

  “Of course you do,” he said heartily. “But that’ll happen in no time, believe me. And if, by any chance, the other thing does happen, nature will take over, and you’ll feel fine about it. Now you have a lovely snooze, and I’ll wake you up in time for tea.”

  But she didn’t sleep at all. She lay and worried about why they wanted her to have a baby so badly, and felt guilty that she didn’t feel as they did.

  The rest of the week was passed with music and Michael drawing her and beginning an oil painting, and jokes and games with neighbours and a dance and the Judge reading aloud to them, and they all treated her with teasing, affectionate indulgence and she was the favoured, petted child bride. Conversation at meals was exhilarating: the family jokes involved being better read and having a far larger vocabulary than she possessed. She had asked the Judge, whom she had learned to call Pete, if he would make her a reading list.

  “He was delighted,” Michael said when they were dressing for dinner that evening. “You do fit in so well with my family, my darling.”

  “How did you know I had asked him?”

  “Mummy told me. She was very touched that you asked him.”

  Whenever people came to lunch or dinner, they would ask Michael about his ship, and he always told them, usually at great length. She noticed that however often he talked about the superior merits of Oelikon guns to the Bofers or Rolls, Zee listened with rapt interest as though it was the first time she had heard him on the subject. Privately, she found these conversations very boring, more boring even than when they talked about the war more generally: the battle for Stalingrad, which was on the news every night, and the bombing raids on Germany.

  During all this time, which was actually very short, only two weeks, excitement, like a heat haze, had obscured most of any other feeling: she had married her wonderful, glamorous Michael, who, although he was so much older and famous and brave, had chosen her. It was exciting, if you have never thought much of your appearance or brains, if you felt, as she felt then, that you had not been properly educated, to be told from morning till night how beautiful, clever and talented you were. It was a fairytale, and she was the fortunate princess who at nineteen had already embarked upon her “ever after.”

  They left Hatton at the end of the week, and went by train to London. Michael had to go to the Admiralty and they arranged to meet at Waterloo station.

  “What will you do with yourself, darling?”

  She hadn’t thought. “I’ll be all right. I might try to get hold of Stella, but they don’t like you ringing students at Pitman’s. If I can’t get her, I’ll go to the National Gallery.”

  “Have you got any money?”

  “Oh! No—no, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  He thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. “There.”

  “I won’t need all that!”

  “You never know. You might. I’ll deal with the luggage.”

  They kissed. It was enjoyable (she did not then know how enjoyable) to part knowing that they would meet again so soon.

  She tried to ring Stella from a telephone box but could not get her, so she went to the National Gallery where Myra Hess and Isolde Menges were playing two pianos. In the interval, when she was buying a sandwich, she saw Sid talking to a very old man with thick white hair and a walking stick. She was just about to walk over and make herself known, when she saw a youngish woman, or girl, in fact somebody probably no older than she, leaning against the wall at the end of the sandwich table and staring at Sid with a look of such intense, moony devotion that she wanted almost to laugh. What Aunt Jessica used to call a pash, I suppose, she thought. At that moment, Sid saw her, smiled and beckoned.

  She was introduced as Louise Hadleigh to the man with white hair and the man said, yes, he recognized her. “You married my old friend Zinnia Storey’s son a few weeks ago. How is Zee? Now she is in the country so much, I hardly ever see her.”

  Fumbling about to shake hands, he dropped his stick. Instantly, the girl leaning against the wall had leapt forward, bent down and picked it up.

  “How kind!”

  The girl blushed—her forehead looked damp, Louise noticed—as Sid said, “Well fielded, Thelma,” and introduced her to them as one of her pupils. Then the interval was over, and everyone began leaving the basement where the sandwiches were served for the resumption of the concert.

  “Please give my love to Zee,” the man said and she smiled and said yes, she would. But as she would not be seeing Zee for she did not know how long and had not the faintest idea who he was there was no chance of that, she thought.

  When the concert was over, after the lovely and expected comforting encore of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” she wondered what to do. There were no pictures to see at the gallery: they had all been removed to a place or places of safety. She walked out into Trafalgar Square. There was sun, but it was without heat, and the sky was an unclouded cool blue decorated by the glinting barrage balloons that floated serenely—like gigantic toys, she thought. It was two hours until the train, and she wondered what to do. Michael had given her a wad of pounds, there must be at least ten of them; she felt rich, and free—and then, with no warning at all, extremely frightened. “What am I to do with myself?” “Why am I here?” “What am I for?” A host of small, darting, preposterous queries that seemed to come at her from nowhere and were only dwarfed by their quantity. To answer any of them—even to consider them—spelled complete danger: she would not attempt any reply; she must do something, think of something else. I’ll go to a bookshop, and buy some books, she thought and, furnished with this sensible and practical purpose, she caught the bus to Piccadilly that stopped outside Hatchard’s.

  By the time she had bought three books and hailed a cab to take her to Waterloo her spirits had risen. She was not going tamely home to Sussex to be criticized by her mother and asked to do boring things by the rest of the family. She was catching a train with her husband and then a boat to the Isle of Wight where they were to stay in an hotel—something she had never done in her life before. She was Mrs. Michael Hadleigh again, and not whoever it was who had been struck by some idiotic panic on the steps of the National Gallery. It would have been nice to get hold of Stella, but she would write to her.

  But, she quickly discovered, life in that hotel, and subsequently in other hotels, in Weymouth and Lewes, was not at all as she had imagined. Michael went off at eight in the morning and she was left for the day, day after day, with nothing whatever to do. The Gloster Hotel had a particular disadvantage, made worse because, to begin with, it had seemed like an incredible luxury. There was always lobster for lunch and for dinner. Occasionally there was something else, usually not awfully nice, but after a week or so, she took to having whatever it was. She got bored with lobster; and started to hate it. She read books, and went for walks in the town, but the place was stiff with troops, and the whistling and inaudible, but undoubtedly rude remarks made
her dread going out. Then one day she went into a greengrocer to buy some apples and, without the slightest warning, seemed to lose her balance, everything went black, and she came to on the ground surrounded by a smell of earthy hessian. Someone was bending over her and telling her she would be all right, and asking her where she lived, and she simply couldn’t think. Her head was propped against a sack of potatoes and she’d laddered her stocking. They gave her some water, and she felt better. “The Gloster Hotel,” she said. “I can easily walk there.” But a kind woman took her back there, got the key of her room for her and helped her upstairs. “I should have a little lie-down if I were you,” she said when Louise thanked her. After she had gone, she did lie on their bed, on top of the slippery quilt. It was half past eleven by her gold watch that the Judge had given her. Michael would not be back until six in the evening. She felt shocked and suddenly violently homesick. She began to cry and when she had finished and blown her nose on one of Michael’s large white handkerchiefs she lay on the bed again. There did not seem to be any point in getting up.

  After that she would lie in bed in the mornings, watching Michael shave and dress with what seemed to her a heartless speed and pray that something would happen that would stop him going. The ship he commanded was a new MTB still on the slips on the Medina river and he was passionately excited by everything to do with her. Every evening he came home full of news about its progress (she had learned to call it “she” but privately she thought of the ship as “it”). They had dinner and then he drew her and then they went to bed and he made love to her and it was always exactly the same and she tried not to disenjoy it. She did not tell him how lonely and aimless—well, bored really, she felt, because she was ashamed of these feelings. There were no other naval wives staying in the hotel, there were no other women there: people came and went; they seemed to be the only long stayers in the place. When she told him about fainting in the greengrocer’s shop, he smiled and said, “Oh, darling! Do you think it might be—”

  “What?” She knew what he meant, but she was so appalled at the idea that she wanted to gain time.

  “Darling! A baby! What we’ve been trying to have!”

  “I don’t know. It might be, I suppose. People are alleged to faint at such times. And feel sick in the mornings. But I haven’t felt in the least sick.”

  Shortly after that, she did meet a naval wife, a lady much older than herself whose husband was commander of a destroyer and she suggested that Louise come and help her at the Mission to Seaman. “We’re always short of willing hands,” she said; “there’s bound to be something for you to do, my dear.”

  So from nine until twelve each morning she either helped in the canteen, or made up endless bunks. This last entailed stripping the sheets off the old ones—generally extraordinarily grey and concealing beer bottles, odd socks and other detritus. This coincided with her starting to feel sick in the mornings. When Marjorie Anstruther discovered her retching over a sink, she sent her home to lie down, saying she quite understood, and that Louise had been a little Trojan to stick it out. So that was the end of that. She was pregnant, and she had gradually come to think that perhaps this was as it should be: if one got married and had nothing else to do, one was meant to have babies. Although the prospect still secretly terrified her, she managed to seem cheerful about it, and very soon a letter arrived from Zee, saying how delighted she was with the news (which Michael had telephoned to her).

  She spent her mornings feeling sick and sometimes being it and mostly otherwise in bed, but at noon, as regular as clockwork, a single German reconnaissance plane came over the island and thence to Portsmouth, and all the ships lying in what she had learned to call Cowes Roads let off every anti-aircraft gun at their disposal. They never hit the plane, but the noise was very great, and Michael had told her always to be on the ground floor on these occasions. So she would put on her overcoat and creep down—braving the nauseous fumes of boiling lobsters—to the hall, where pieces of glass dripped disconsolately from the roof down onto the tiled floor, while she read very old numbers of the Illustrated London News. After about fifteen minutes, the plane sheered off. Then she would go back to her room and sometimes she would collect her things and go along the passage for a bath. She had come to dread the lonely lunches in the hotel dining room and usually went out to the town to a cake shop that sold buns and very solid Cornish pasties that were mostly potato and onion. She had run out of books to read quite quickly, but there was a bookshop, and she spent hours there choosing, but they didn’t seem to mind. She read novels by Ethyl Mannin, G. B. Stern, Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson, and then one day she saw a second-hand copy of Mansfield Park. It was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly and she could not resist buying it. After that, she bought all the others, in spite of the fact that she had a whole set at home in Sussex. They engrossed and comforted her more than anything else and she read them all twice. When she wrote to Stella, it was largely about what she was reading. “By the way, I’m pregnant!” she put at the end of one letter. The exclamation mark was meant to make it sound exciting. She thought about telling Stella what she felt about this, and what life was being like for her, but found she could not bear to do it. It meant thinking about things seriously, and she felt too confused and altogether unsure of everything to try. Also, she was afraid it might clear things up in a way that she might find unendurable. As long as she played her part (and she was in love with Michael—look at how she hated him going every morning and practically counted the hours until his return), it would be a kind of betrayal to say that she was finding life difficult—or boring. “Intelligent people are never bored,” Zee had said at Hatton during her honeymoon. “Do you agree with that, Pete?” And the Judge had replied that it might imply a certain dimness. She must never be dim.

  By the middle of November, Michael’s ship was ready, and Zee and the Judge came to Cowes for a night, as Zee was to launch her. Rooms were booked for them at the hotel, and Michael got off work early to meet the ferry at Ryde.

  Dinner was at the Royal Yacht Squadron—very grand—because Zee knew an admiral who was a member and who invited them all.

  “Dear little Louise! You are looking splendid. Pete has brought your reading list.”

  At dinner there was the dreaded lobster and Michael talked with unflagging enthusiasm about his ship. “I can’t wait to see her!” Zee exclaimed and Louise saw Michael basking in her enthusiasm. It transpired that the Admiral, whom they called Bobbie, had not been going to be present at the launch, but by the end of the evening Zee had got him to say he would come.

  But the next morning, Louise, apart from a particularly virulent bout of sickness, had a sore throat and a temperature.

  “Poor darling! Better stay in bed, though. Can’t have you getting ill. I’ll get them to send you up some breakfast.” After a long time, tea in a scalding metal pot, two pieces of leathery toast and a pat of bright yellow margarine arrived. The tea tasted of metal and she could not face the toast at all. It was all too much. Just when something was actually happening she couldn’t go, was doomed to yet another dreary lonely day, only worse than usual, as she felt so awful. She got out of bed to go to the lavatory—an icy interlude; there was no heat in the bedroom. She put on a vest and some socks and went back to bed with some aspirin which sent her to sleep.

  Michael came back in the evening to say that he was sleeping on board as the ship was starting her trials early the next morning. Zee and the Judge had left, but Mummy had been marvellous at the launching, and they had had a jolly lunch.

  “Poor darling, you still look rather mouldy. Mrs. Watson says she sent somebody upstairs to see if you wanted any lunch, but you were asleep. Shall I get them to get you something for supper?”

  “Couldn’t you have it with me?”

  “Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m expected back on board. The flotilla commander is dining with us.”

  “When will you be back, then?”

  “Tomorrow e
vening, I expect. But, I told you, darling, while the trials are on life will be hectic. I shan’t be able to sleep ashore all the time. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky, you know.”

  “Have we?”

  He had been collecting his shaving gear and cramming it into a brand new black leather briefcase.

  “Darling, of course we have. My Number One hasn’t seen his fiancée since Christmas. And our coxswain hasn’t even set eyes on his latest son who is nearly six months old. I don’t say we shouldn’t be lucky, I want you to be the luckiest girl in the world, but it doesn’t do any harm to recognize one’s blessings. Most officers I know couldn’t afford to have their wives in an hotel. Do you know where my pyjamas are?”

  “Afraid I don’t.” She was so miserable at the thought of a night and a whole day entirely alone that she sounded sulky.

  “They must be somewhere! Honestly, darling, try to think.”

  “Well, usually the chambermaid puts them under the pillow when she makes the bed. But she didn’t come in this morning.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll take some new ones.”

  But when he got some out, they proved to be almost without buttons.

  “Oh, damn! Darling, you might have looked them over when they came back from the laundry. After all, it isn’t as though you have an awful lot to do.”

  “I’ll sew them on now, if you like.”

  “They aren’t there to sew on. You’ll have to get some.”

  He took her Royal Yacht Squadron burgee brooch, presented by the Admiral the previous night to celebrate Michael’s being made an honorary member. “I should think I’m the only naval officer who does up his pyjamas with one of these. I must fly now.” He bent to kiss her forehead. “Cheer up: don’t get too gloomy.” At the door, he blew her another kiss. “You look very cosy,” he said.

  After he had gone, and she was sure that he wouldn’t be coming back, she had wept.

  When she was better he had suggested that she go to her home for a bit while he finished the trials. “Then, when I know where we’ll be sent, you can join me again.”