But her mind was full of humiliating scenes—of her passing out, being sick, being unable to control herself in any way—and not being able to remember any of it, made it somehow far worse …
“I think I should go,” she said. “If you could get me a cab?”
“I had a better plan,” he said. “Someone has lent me an automobile. I’ll take you home, wait while you get into some warm clothes, and then I thought we’d drive out into the country some place—and have us a square meal.” And before she could respond, he added, “In case you’re worrying about whether I took advantage of you last night, let me tell you that I did not.” He put a large hairy hand over hers on the table. “Cross my heart and hope to die. Nothing happened. OK?”
“All right,” she said. She still felt embarrassed, but also now relieved: she believed him about last night, which didn’t mean that she trusted him otherwise.
“All right, that’s enough of the Happy New Years,” Archie said. “Now what about the resolutions?”
They were in the drawing room. The older members of the family had gone to bed: the Duchy and Miss Milliment had bad colds; Rachel had succumbed to her toothache immediately after the chimes of Big Ben had announced the New Year, “I can’t kiss any of you, darlings, my face feels like a boiling marrow,” she had said, trying to smile but looking ghastly, Clary thought. Edward and Villy were in London celebrating with Hermione. So Archie and Hugh were left with the children—allowed to stay up down to Lydia, who had promised to go to bed when Archie made her. Everybody had kissed everyone else and wished them a Happy New Year.
“Couldn’t we play charades?” Lydia thought they might take longer than resolutions.
“No, Archie said resolutions. How many do we have to have? One, or as many as we like?”
“I think three each,” Archie said. “What do you say, Hugh?”
“What? Oh, by all means, three. Whisky?”
“Thanks.” Lydia seized his glass and carried it over to her uncle. She was hell bent on pleasing, hoping that resolutions might lead to charades.
“What are they?” Neville said. “I mean what sort of thing?”
“Oh, good ones, of course,” Polly said. “Like being kind to your enemies.”
“That’s a silly idea. They wouldn’t be my enemies if I was kind to them.”
“Well, they are meant to be good,” Archie said. “I mean constructive, you know, vaguely improving.”
Someone suggested writing them down, and Lydia flew to the card table and got out the old score pads and pencils that people used for anything from bridge to racing demon.
“Five minutes,” Archie said. “And then everybody can read out their own.”
“Or other people’s,” Clary said. “Oh, yes—we could muddle them up and then a person takes one and we all have to guess whose it is. That makes it far more interesting. Oh, do let’s do it that way!”
“You win,” Archie said. “Put another log on the fire or I shall freeze to death before your very eyes.”
There ensued a fidgety pencil-chewing silence.
“I’ve finished,” Lydia said. “I’ve thought of wonderful ones. Really good and kind.”
“You do realize you’ve jolly well got to do them, don’t you?” Simon said. His efforts had made him feel extremely hot. However hard he tried to think, all he came up with was “Kiss Miss Blenkinsopp,” a resolve he felt better left unsaid. She was the art mistress at school—old, of course, but far younger than the masters and absolutely wizard to look at with black hair and scarlet lips and a wispy fringe that she kept pushing out of her marvellous eyes with a long white hand that had turquoise rings on it. “Learn to draw,” he put.
Neville was also having problems. He was planning to run away from his horrible school, but he couldn’t decide where to. If the war finished, he could probably get a job as an inventor. Meanwhile, he considered living with Cicely Courtneidge whose record about ordering two dozen double damask dinner napkins entranced him however often he played it.
Clary did hers, which were intensely boring, she thought, and then went and fetched a hat from the gun room in which they could put their pieces of paper.
“Hurry up,” she urged the slow ones.
“Time’s up.” Archie put his paper in the hat and handed it round.
He was the first one to read. “‘Be kind to old people,’” he read. “‘Give all my money away. Save someone’s life.’”
“That’s mine,” Lydia said, which anyone could have known by the smug look on her face.
“Idiotic,” Neville said. “You don’t want to save anyone’s life, you fool. Hitler’s? Would you save his life?”
“No-o. But I’m most unlikely to meet him. A good person’s life, of course.”
“So you’d go up to someone who was falling out of an aeroplane and say, ‘Are you good?’ and depending on their answer, and of course they wouldn’t tell the truth however wicked they were, you’d save them? I never heard anything so stupid in all my life.”
“I don’t think she meant it quite like that,” Archie said mildly.
“Well, the money bit is idiotic too. She’s spent all her Christmas money so it would only be a shilling a week. How will you be able to give me a birthday present if you give all your money away? Or,” he added broad-mindedly, “a birthday present for anybody else come to that.”
Lydia was trying not to cry, frowning and holding her bottom lip in her teeth.
“You’re far too horrible to give a present to,” she said. “You can see how difficult it is to be good with someone as wicked and awful as Neville about,” she appealed to the rest of them.
“I think we should just read the papers and people listen.” Archie handed the hat to Polly.
“‘Not smoke so much. Be more patient with people. Help the Duchy with the garden.’ That must be you, Dad.” There was a moment’s silence, and then she said, “I think you’re awfully patient with people. I really do.”
Archie noticed them smile at each other, she aching to comfort, he, acknowledging but comfortless: there was the same feeling of pain in the room as there had been earlier, when Clary had wanted to drink to absent friends, meaning her father but the implication had gone further than she had intended.
“Your turn, Clary,” he said briskly.
Clary unfolded the piece of paper she had chosen and read with elaborate scorn. “‘Finish the war! Leave school! Have lunch with Cicely Courtneidge.’ We know who that is! Wrong end of the stick as usual. Honestly, Neville. It’s not meant just to have things you’d like in it. Or things like the war stopping which you couldn’t possibly do!”
“They’re what I resolute. I’m not going to change them.”
“You can’t leave school till you’re years and years older,” Lydia said. “And as you aren’t Prime Minister, thank the Lord, you can’t stop the war. And Cicely Courtneidge wouldn’t dream of having lunch with an unknown boy. I agree with Clary.”
“We agreed not to comment on people’s resolutions,” Archie said. “Hugh?”
“‘Learn to draw. Learn to write poetry. Invent something.’ Heavens, Poll, is that you?”
“It’s me,” Simon said. He had gone scarlet.
“Goodness. What interesting things, Simon,” Polly remarked.
“It’s very difficult to learn to write poetry,” Clary said. “I have a feeling you have to be born to do it. And I should think we’d have noticed by now if you had a vestige of talent.”
“Clary, that’s rather crushing.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
But Polly said, “Yes, it was.”
“Come on, finish the game,” Archie said. “It’s time we all went to bed.”
“What about charades?”
“Nobody wants to play them except you. Come on, it’s your turn to read.”
“‘Learn French. Stop biting my nails. Mend my clothes before they get unmendable,’” Lydia read. “That must be you, Clary. You’re the only one who se
riously bites nails.”
“She only bites her own,” Neville pointed out. “I think she ought to be allowed to do that. If she bit other people’s you could be against her.”
“Your turn to read, Neville,” Archie said.
“‘Go swimming. Learn Russian. Do some drawing.’ I don’t see how swimming can be a resolution.” He liked swimming: why on earth hadn’t he thought of that?
“It’s you, Archie, isn’t it?”
“Yep. I hate swimming in swimming baths. It’s to get my leg better. I feel like a tiger in a cage. Up and down, to and fro.”
“When we come to London, I’ll come with you,” Clary said. “We can have interesting conversations, and you won’t notice how boring it is.”
“Well, I’m for bed,” Hugh said, as though he had been waiting for the earliest possible moment to say it.
“Oh, must we?”
“Nobody’s read me,” Polly said.
“Oh, darling Poll!” He sat down again. “Read away. I really want to know.”
“It isn’t for me to read,” Polly said. “But there’s not much point, because you’ll all know it is me.”
“We still want to know,” Archie said.
“I haven’t read anyone’s,” Simon said, and took the paper.
“‘Learn to cook. Teach Wills to read. Tell the truth.’”
“You see? It wasn’t at all interesting.” She was clearly very hurt.
“Yes, it was,” Simon said, with embarrassingly obvious loyalty.
“Bed,” Archie said. “Everybody do all the right things. Put the guard in front of the fire. Put the cat out. Be quiet on the stairs. Give me a hand, Poll. No thanks, Lydia, I’d rather have Poll.”
“What does he mean ‘cat’? Flossy’ll be in the kitchen. She wouldn’t like us to put her anywhere.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Lydia,” Hugh said. He had kissed Polly, and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “Good night, old chap.” Kissing his children made him want to cry. This time last year, he thought, she was here. She was just beginning to feel rotten again, but she was here.
“Do you think it will be a Happy New Year?”
“Oh, I think it’s bound to be better. We’ve got the Germans on the run, you know, now. Monty’s doing a marvellous job. I shouldn’t be surprised if El Alamein won’t prove to be the turning point. And they’re getting nowhere in Russia. Nobody who invades Russia reckons with the winter. And we’re giving them merry hell on their home ground. Yes, I think we can definitely say that nineteen forty-three will be happier. For us, God bless us.” He smiled kindly at her, and said, “Is your husband away at the wars?”
“Not any more. He was briefly in the RAF but then he had to go back to manage the family business.” Then she found herself saying, “Of course, he fought in the first war … in the Fifth Army.”
“With dear old Goffy? Very fond of him. Well, it must be nice for you to have him home.”
It would be, she thought, if he was. His non-appearance at Hermione’s party had caused her, first, anger, then embarrassment, and finally anxiety. Where was he? He wasn’t at his flat, and his shaving things weren’t there either. He wasn’t at home, because she’d rung on the pretext of wishing them a Happy New Year, and if he had been, of course they would have said so. But “Have a lovely party,” Rachel had said, “you both deserve some fun together.” She hadn’t told them he wasn’t with her. But, of course, she had to tell Hermione. She’d rung her from the flat.
“Darling, how tiresome for you. Never mind, perhaps he’ll simply turn up here. Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve got two spare men coming anyway.”
She was sitting next to one of them now. Colonel Chessington-Blair was a rotund pink little man in his early sixties. He reminded her of a cork, bobbing up to the surface of every conversation saying all the first things that had come into other people’s heads in the brisk understated way that almost transformed them into original utterances. He worked in what he called the war house; one could not imagine him out of uniform.
When the ladies withdrew and most of them had gone to Hermione’s bedroom, Hermione had linked an arm with her to stay her from joining the others and said, “You were divine to be so sweet to old Piggy. I could see he simply adored you.” Then she said, “Don’t worry about Edward. Something must have come up and I expect he tried to get hold of you. You know what telephones are like these days.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“Why don’t you stay the night here? It couldn’t be easier, and you know how frightful it is getting cabs on this sort of occasion.”
She said, no, she’d rather go to the flat. (What could possibly have “come up”?)
It was nice to be wearing evening clothes, being in London, being at a party, but every time she started to enjoy these things, the mysterious absence of Edward intervened, and she felt cross and frightened. Supposing something awful had happened to him? She hardly knew whether she least wanted it to be his fault that he wasn’t there, or not his fault at all.
Polly and Clary
Spring, 1943
There was a small, magical patch of time between being completely asleep and becoming awake that she had begun to notice ever since they’d gone to London. It had no prescribed duration, always felt tantalizingly short since it began to fade the moment she became aware of it. Sometimes she thought it was the very end of a dream, since not only her heart and thoughts but her body had a weightless light about them—a kind of serene detachment that still possessed joyous response to something that was already mysteriously slipping into the past, dissolving into distant memory and mist until it seemed either forgotten, or never known at all. Dreams could be like that, she knew. They could be like telegrams, or the most significant lines of a poem—so crammed with a fragment of truth that for a moment they seemed to illuminate the whole of it. But dreams did not always contain joyful messages: they could convey anything from anxiety to nightmare—she knew that. Her recurring nightmare—only once told to Clary—about trying to kiss her mother’s forehead and it simply melting into the pillow, had a kind of rigid horror that no amount of repetition rendered powerless. But this patch was more as though she was flying in some sunlit element, alighting upon her own body, and then entering it to discover that her wings had disappeared. She was ordinary Polly lying flat on her back on the top floor of her father’s house in London. Next door, would be Clary, profoundly asleep until physically shaken. Perhaps, she thought, it only happened because she was sleeping alone: at Home Place she had always shared a room with Clary, and sometimes Louise as well. At least Clary had her own room—bed-sitting rooms they were called, but for Polly living in her father’s house, with the kitchen three floors down in the basement was not the same as them having their own flat, which had always been their plan. But when it came to the point and she had discovered that Dad had always thought they would live with him, and when he had discovered that they had meant to find their own place and she had seen his intense disappointment congeal to good-natured acquiescence, she knew that she could not persist. “You can find a flat,” she had said to Clary, “but I simply can’t. It’s the first time I’ve seen Dad at all pleased or excited about anything since Mummy died. He so hates being alone in the house without her. You do see, don’t you?” And Clary, shooting her a look compounded of disappointment, exasperation and love, had said immediately, “Course I do. And I wouldn’t dream of having a flat without you in it.” Her face always showed all of her feelings however careful her voice was about them.
And Dad had been sweet about everything. They were to have the top floor to themselves. “You could make bed-sitting rooms as they are quite large,” he had said. “And you have your own bathroom on the half landing. And I’ll have a telephone plug put on the top floor. I expect you’ll want to ring up your friends. And if you want to have a party with them, I can always be out. You must just tell me what you want in the way of furniture. I expect the rooms need paintin
g as well. You must choose the colours you would both like.” He talked and talked about it, and when Clary said could she bring all her books from home, he said of course, and when he saw how many there were, he’d have bookshelves made for them. It was as though he wanted them to live there for ever.
They got furniture from all over the place. Aunt Rach said they could have curtains from Chester Terrace because the ones that were there were so flimsy and awful and no good for blackout.
Now, after barely three months, they had got into a routine. They went to the secretarial course at Pitman’s five days a week, bicycling there four of the days, but on Fridays they went by bus, because of going straight on after work to catch a train for Sussex. Clary wanted to stay in London for the weekends, and sometimes she did, but Polly felt that she ought to go home to see Wills. He was not especially glad to see her, but she felt that if she stuck at it he might get to be. He liked her if she did everything he wanted, and so she spent cold afternoons pushing him on his fairy cycle, helping him build nameless structures with the family Meccano, and reading him Winnie-the-Pooh. He had become a disconsolate tyrant, determined upon having everything that he did not really want, using the innumerable gratified whims like leaves to cover the secret body of his loss. So, he would insist upon wearing one red sock and one blue; he would not eat his mashed potato until he had transferred it to his mug; he filled his bed with fir cones many of which had mysterious names; he had awful bouts of simply opening and then slamming doors. Aunt Villy was teaching him to read, but he would only do it if she let him wear a hat. It was almost a year now, but she knew that he still missed his mother, although the aunts seemed to think he was getting over it. So she went because of him. She went also because of her father. He loved meeting her at the station, buying her a paper to read (when Clary was there he always bought her one as well). He usually went to sleep half-way through the journey while she sat trying to learn her grammalogues. The weekends were always the same. They were met by Tonbridge who told them of any minor misfortunes that had occurred during the week—they sometimes had bets together about who these would be about—and then they would get a few of his opinions, couched as questions, about the war. At the house, the smells—so familiar when she had lived there that she had not noticed them—were of damp log fires, the Brig’s pipe smoke, beeswax and occasional wafts of food cooking as Eileen barged back and forth through the baize door laying the dining room for dinner. Upstairs, the smells changed to lavender, Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, shoe polish, clothes drying in front of the nursery fire, and the sounds were either of children having baths, or of people trying to make them. She would go to her room to get into a warmer jersey for supper: they no longer changed for dinner excepting on Saturday night when she always wore her pale green brocaded housecoat made of curtain material by the aunts for her birthday last year. After supper, they would all listen to the news and then she and Clary would play bezique and racing demon. She always missed Clary when Clary stayed in London, and on top of missing her, she could not help feeling envious: Clary used to go to the cinema with Archie and sometimes the theatre, and got taken out to meals. Apart from the treat side of it, she was alone with Archie which Polly felt was a treat in itself. Of course, he came for the weekend sometimes, and you could bet that Clary never stayed in London then. What it amounted to was that she, Polly, never had evenings alone with Archie but then, she kept reminding herself, she had responsibilities and Clary had none. All the same, the old niggling thing of this not being fair attacked her: of course she knew by now that things weren’t, but that did not in the least prevent her wanting them to be.
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