They had talked, he had said, as though they had just met, uncovering layers about each other, like onion skins, she had said and when she became too tired to talk, he would read to her: she especially liked poetry, which had never meant much to him. “To tell the truth,” he had said, “I often read pages of the stuff without really knowing what was going on. But as I got used to it, sometimes I’d suddenly see what the chap was on about and actually it was very good—very telling.” He’d bought one or two of her favourite books with him, he said, and was working his way through them, but it wasn’t the same. In the end, she had got so weak from the bloody pain, that she’d just wanted him to sit with her and not say very much. But a couple of days before she had died when she’d just had a shot of something and wasn’t feeling too bad, she’d said did he remember when they were in St. Moritz, which, of course, he did and she’d smiled and said, “Tell me about it,” and he had. There had been a long silence after that. Remembering Hugh’s face as the shadowy little smile of reminiscence came and went before it could reach his poor haunted eyes, he felt a return of the familiar, protective love that he had always had for this older brother. There was something rigid, inflexibly unworldly, honourable and innocent about Hugh that needed protection, he thought. At the moment it was the inflexibility that he was up against. Oh, well, he mustn’t be too impatient with the old boy.
“Sorry to be so long. Jamie wants you to say good night to him.” She had changed into a dark blue velvet housecoat thing that made her skin look very attractive. “I’ve got Susan off, so don’t let him get too excited and make a noise.”
Jamie lay flat on his back with the blanket up to his chin.
“Hallo, old boy.”
“Hallo, old boy.” He thought for a moment and then added, “I’m not actually old. Well, I am old, but I’m not as old as you. You must be very very very very old.”
“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” He was certainly feeling it this evening.
“How old are you?” he asked, as though this question had long been lying between them.
“Forty-six.”
“Forty-six! Good God!”
“Jamie, I don’t think you should say that.”
“My grandfather, who lives in Scotland, says it all the time. He even said it about a wasp on his marmalade at breakfast. And he says it all the time he’s reading the paper. So of course I’ve picked it up. Mrs. Campbell who cooks there says it’s astonishing what I pick up. If you pick things up you can’t help it,” he explained.
“What do you think of your new sister?”
He pretended to consider. “I really don’t like her. I’d much rather we’d had a dog. I don’t like her because she’s ugly and stupid you see.”
“Oh well,” he said, as he got up from Jamie’s bed, “I expect you’ll like her when she’s older.”
“I don’t expect. Will you read me a story?”
“Not tonight, old chap. I’m going to have some dinner now.”
“Tell her to say good night to me. Order her.”
As he left the room, Jamie called, “Uncle Edward! If I shot her, would I get beheaded?”
“I should think you jolly well might.”
“Good God!”
“He didn’t mean you, of course, he meant Susan.”
“I know that. He’s fearfully jealous, poor lamb.”
“But he wouldn’t do anything awful to her, would he?”
“He might try to,” she said calmly. “You have to try and imagine what it’s like to be him. Supposing, just as an example”—her voice became mellow with reason—“suppose you suddenly took me back to Home Place one day, and told Villy that although, of course, you loved her, I would be living there with both of you henceforth. How do you think she would feel?”
“Don’t be absurd. Naturally she wouldn’t like it.”
“That’s an understatement, surely. She’d be fiendishly jealous. I know I would be.”
In the short silence that followed, she noticed that his eyes had become as bleak as blue marbles.
“I’m afraid I really can’t see the parallel,” he said at last.
“I only meant that that is how Jamie feels about Susan. I’ll get our stew.”
It wasn’t all she had meant at all, he thought. It was as near as she dared to get to telling him what she felt. He knew that he should take the bull by the horns but, as dear old Rupe had once said, when you did that you had to bear in mind the fact that you were still faced with the rest of the bull.
“Well, now! Happy New Year, little girl.”
“Happy New Year.” For a minute, she did not know where she was, but she had learned to lie low on these occasions, knowing that, one way or another, she soon would know.
“Boy! That was some night we had ourselves. How are you feeling?”
She tried to sit up and her head started pounding, like a huge piece of cumbersome machinery. She relapsed onto the pillow and shut her eyes to try to stop the room rocking.
“Poor baby! Now you just lie there and Uncle Earl will fix you something.”
That was it! He was the one she had met in the Astor last week when she’d had the row with Joe Bronstein because she’d wanted to go home and he wouldn’t. Earl had come over to their table and somehow—magically—sorted things out. In no time she had found herself being taken home in a taxi to her flat, where he had escorted her to the door, made sure she got in and then left her in peace. The next morning a large bunch of red roses arrived with his card, that had Colonel Earl C. Black on it and a note with his telephone number that said how much he would like to see her again. She was fed up with Joe, who had proved to be as predictable as everybody else in bed and more tiresome than many out of it, so now here she was, in the Major’s flat, she presumed, though she could remember nothing of how she got there. Never mind. If she kept absolutely still, kept her eyes shut, the pounding grind in her head did seem to be getting less …
“… now, then, Angie honey, sit up …”
“What is it?”
He was holding out a glass that contained some brownish red liquid.
“Honestly, I couldn’t. I feel awful.”
“I know, sweetheart, but this will make you better. Trust Earl.” He put an arm round her shoulder and hoisted her up, and held the glass to her mouth. She couldn’t feel worse, she thought, and therefore obediently swallowed the peppery sharp, slippery mixture although it made her retch.
“That’s my girl,” he said. He put the glass down and draped her shoulders—which were bare, she realized—in his striped pyjama jacket.
“You just sit for a while and then you’ll feel fine. A hot shower and you’ll feel better still.”
“Have you by any chance got a toothbrush I could use?”
“I do,” he said. “Do you want to go to the bathroom before I take my shower?”
She did. She got out of bed and tottered across the room clutching the jacket round her—it came nearly to her knees.
When she returned and had climbed gratefully back into bed, he was wearing boxer shorts. She watched him as he walked about the small beige bedroom selecting clothes. He was a barrel-chested man, with broad shoulders and wiry hair that rioted over his chest like grizzled scrub. He had a wide low forehead from which more grizzled but copious hair sprang in a pronounced peak. His eyebrows grew in a militant manner like small brambles, his muscular arms with thick wrists were hirsute like his legs. He must be quite old, she thought—at least forty. She wondered whether he had made love to her (she still called it that), but she wouldn’t ask. Surprisingly, she did feel better. Across the room, her dress from last night was carefully draped upon a small brocaded chair.
He said it was time for her to shower and conducted her to the small bathroom—even turned it on for her. “There’s a robe on the back of the door,” he said, “you can wear that.”
She looked awful. The bathroom mirror with its heartless little light above (there was no window in the bathroo
m) revealed a pallid face with dark rings of smudged mascara round her eyes and streaks of other make-up running down her neck. Her usually smooth and shining hair looked matted and dark as though she had sweated all night, her eyebrows, plucked so that they needed a pencil to delineate them were just two shadowy half moons. Next to the basin was a towel rail on which were her underclothes: stockings, suspender belt and knickers—all recently washed. Oh, God! Tears of humiliation filled her eyes: she could not remember anything except that they had been sitting in some night club new to her—dark, as they all were—at a tiny rocking table that had bottles and glasses on it. “Happy New Year,” he had said, and she just remembered the feeling of total despair that had surged up in her, threatening even her party smile as she had gulped down her drink to quench it. That was all. She couldn’t remember a thing after that. She couldn’t even remember feeling drunk, a sensation both disagreeable and familiar, but she must have been—very drunk—if she had such a blackout. I must stop, she thought, try something else, get away, find something different—a new life. I can’t go on like this. But the bleakness of any alternative seemed terrifying in its openness: she could do absolutely anything without it making any difference. Meanwhile, somehow she must get through the next hour, clean herself up, rejoin him and apologize and creep home, away from the whole squalid incident. She took off the pyjama jacket and stepped into the shower, which although it nearly scalded her, was somehow comforting. Hot water was not often available in her flat: Carol, the girl with whom she shared it always seemed just to have had the only hot bath the geyser afforded. While she was drying herself, she thought of the flat. Carol would be asleep if she was there: she worked at the London Palladium and always slept until about three in the afternoon. Angela’s bedroom, the smaller of the two, looked out on a black brick wall and tiny courtyard in which the overflowing dustbins of a restaurant were lodged. They had smelt awful last summer. It was about the fourth place she had lived in: girls she had shared with had been called up, got married, found a job somewhere outside London, and since they always seemed to be the main tenant of wherever it was, and she couldn’t afford to live in any of them alone, she had moved on. She still had her job at the BBC—six nights on and three off—so one way or another, all of her life was conducted after dark. There was a tiny kitchenette in the flat, but she never bothered to cook: when she was working, she ate at the canteen, and on her nights off people took her out. She spent her salary on clothes, make-up, having her hair done, and taxis. The advent of the Americans in London had meant that there always seemed to be someone who wanted to take her out. She found them far easier than Englishmen. They were usually lonely, didn’t ask questions about her family, were generous, producing wonderful stockings made of nylon, scent, unlimited cigarettes and drink, tins of butter and Spam (which she exchanged for black market clothes coupons) and once a marvellous length of green silk sent from New York with which she had had a beautiful dress made. They were also usually married, or engaged to someone back home, and although these facts were seldom volunteered, she had become very good at discovering them. To begin with this had worried her, but it didn’t any more. They were miles from homes to which, possibly, they might never return, cut off from everything they knew, and they simply wanted a good time. Their ideas of what this might be varied, but not much. She felt as though she, too, was miles from home, or rather that she had not got one at all; Frensham was being turned into a convalescent place, and ever since her mother had interfered over the Brian thing she had not gone to St. John’s Wood. Her father was safely tucked away in Woodstock; Christopher, the only one of her family for whom she felt the warmth of love, was sweating away at some nursery garden in Sussex—he hated London and so she hardly ever saw him. She had gone to her cousin’s wedding in the autumn, and it had felt extraordinary to be with all the Cazalets again, simply accepted as one of their family, sitting in a pew with her parents and Christopher and Nora and Judy. Sitting there, waiting for Louise to walk up the aisle on Uncle Edward’s arm, she realized how isolated from the family she had become, how shocked they would be if they knew about her life now: sleeping all the morning, pottering about her dreary little room, mending stockings, and ironing and painting her nails; in the afternoon bathing and dressing and going out evening after evening with men she hardly knew, drinking clubs, restaurants, night clubs, necking in taxis, sometimes bringing someone back with her (but not often; she was ashamed of her room and did not like anyone to see it)—if she was going to go to bed with whoever it was, she preferred it to be on their ground, the anonymity of an hotel room.
In the months after Brian had left her, and after the abortion, she had clung to the idea of love. Love, that had been so painful twice—with Rupert and then with Brian—was still to be her goal and salvation: if she continued to seek it, surely one day it would occur. Meanwhile she had to get through the days and nights. Her job was a lonely one: often she hardly spoke to anybody excepting the junior programme engineers on the other side of the glass screen in the studio, and the people in the canteen who doled out her breakfast. She loved dancing: it created an illusion of intimacy; to be in somebody’s arms in a dark place with slow music was a kind of drug; being admired, being wanted, soothed her, made her feel less worthless. She learned how to please … anyone, really—excepting herself. She did not go the whole way with everyone by any means, and made choices; but deep down she felt that admiration had to be paid for, and she dealt with that by calling it only an interim, until she met the wonderful as yet unknown person who would transform her life. It was the war, she told herself: it made everything different, harder and, if one was not very careful, unspeakably boring. But as the months had dragged by the idea of love receded; she was no longer very sure what it was, and one still had to get through life. She had been afraid that she would get called up but when the time came, she failed the medical—something about her chest, they said; it hadn’t bothered her and so she wasn’t interested, just deeply relieved. For at least a week after that, her life had seemed wonderfully free and easy, glamorous even, but it soon slipped back into a kind of limbo where nothing seemed important enough to be more than a boring, or less boring, way of getting through time.
He was knocking on the bathroom door. “Coffee’s up,” he was saying.
She had rinsed her hair under the shower and combed it out. Her face, devoid of make-up, was still faintly flushed by the hot water. She couldn’t look worse than she had before the shower, she thought, and it didn’t matter, anyway. She would drink the coffee, clamber into her damp underclothes and freezing skimpy little frock and get him to put her into a cab. That would be that.
The coffee was laid out on a small rickety table in the sitting room. It was a flat, he had, she realized, not an hotel room or suite. The coffee was very strong and good. When he pushed the sugar bowl towards her and she shook her head, he said, “Take some. I haven’t got any food here, and you’ve got nothing inside you. Don’t feel bad about it, sweetheart. You had a dose of hooch. That stuff was real bad: we won’t go back there again.”
“What about you, then? Did you—”
“I was drinking Scotch. You had gin—that was the trouble.”
“I’m really sorry—”
“Don’t be. It was just lucky it wasn’t the both of us. It was a bad joint.”
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 116