The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Archie has changed his flat to a much nicer one in South Kensington. It is in a tall dark red house looking onto a square but inside it is really nice. He has a gramophone like the Duchy’s with an enormous horn made of some black and gold stuff like papier-mâché, I think, and he has those triangular wooden needles that you have to clip to sharpen after each record. Very modern and jolly expensive, I should think. Anyway, he was playing it when I arrived. We had gins—I had lime in mine—while he finished playing that Schubert quartet that the Duchy loves so much. He said I looked very smart when he hugged me, so at least he noticed. He took me out to dinner at what he called his local restaurant: it was a Cypriot one where you get lamb chops and rice and then a delicious pudding of little fried honey balls and Turkish coffee—but you have to be careful not to drink the muddy part. But we had a most interesting conversation about a new idea called the Welfare State invented by someone called Sir William Beveridge. It is going to mean that everything is much fairer and OK for everyone with free schools and free doctors and hospitals. I think it is an extremely good idea because charity is so patchy and although our family is rich compared to many, most people hardly have anything. We started talking about it because I said that when I earned money I planned to give half of it away to poor people (when I’d first thought this Neville heard and said I could give it to him as he was always poor). But Archie said that we would all pay more taxes which would mean we would be doing our share. He said he thought that after the war even Conservatives would see that things should be fairer and that if everybody had the same opportunities there would be far more people who were clever and useful. I asked him then if he was a Socialist and he said, yes, he was, although he didn’t talk about that much at Home Place, which he described as a hotbed of Tories. He said he had a great respect for Mr. Attlee and hoped he would be Prime Minister which I should have thought very unlikely as Mr. Churchill is so deeply popular. After dinner, Archie said he’d take me home to Ladbroke Grove, but on the way there he said was I sleeping alone in the house, and when I said yes, he said he didn’t like the idea of that and perhaps I’d better stay with him. Of course it was far more enjoyable to do that, so I collected some things from there while he waited in the cab. We went back and he made some cocoa with dried milk which if you put sugar in was not too bad—well, he said that, but I thought it was delicious—and he asked me whether it was nice being in London. I told him then about it being not what I’d imagined—living with Uncle Hugh which doesn’t feel at all the same as having our own place would be. Also, I said it had made us realize that we didn’t know anyone much outside the family and he sympathized with that. I pointed out, for instance, that he was probably the first Socialist I’d ever met, which is pretty feeble, considering my age. Then he said he would take me to dinner with some friends of his the next night—the man is a sculptor who lives with a Spanish woman. He met her when he was fighting in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. He’d known them before the war because they used to live in France. I asked if he’d known you, and Archie said he thinks you met once when you were staying with him, but he’s not sure. Then he said we’d better go to bed as we had a lot to do the next day. That was Friday. It was one of the best evenings of my life, and the best thing about it was that it wasn’t just that one evening—there was the whole of the next day.

  In the morning we had rather burned toast and Marmite and tea and he asked me what I would have been doing if I’d been on my own and I said spend the morning in Charing Cross Road that is absolutely full of bookshops and many of them secondhand ones. Poll doesn’t ever want to do that; she likes shops that have some of everything in them. Archie said what a good idea, and we took a bus and went.

  Here, she paused. Quite suddenly, the gap between the kind of day she had spent with Archie and how she felt about it seemed enormous. It had not seemed like that at the time: if it had, she would not even have got this far in her description of it to her father. It was now, sitting in her bed at Home Place writing very fast with her mind racing ahead of the words on paper, that she had got past those serenely happy hours browsing and searching through the rows of battered books propped against one another on the rickety tables in the bookshops, past the visit to the Redfearn Gallery where Archie had made her look at pictures by a painter called Christopher Wood whom he very much admired, and lunch, spaghetti in an Italian restaurant where men ate with napkins tucked into their collars below their chins to the moment when Archie opened a new packet of his cigarettes, started to take one and then said: “I’m so sorry, darling Clary, want one?” And she had looked up from the proffered packet to the friendly attention of his eyes, had shaken her head and said: “Uncle Hugh has promised Poll and me gold watches if we don’t smoke before we’re twenty-one.”

  “That’s that then,” he had answered. “How old are you now?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in August.”

  “Three and a half years to go. I keep forgetting how young you are.”

  “Seventeen and a half isn’t particularly young.”

  “Of course not. Well, I think you’re absolutely splendid for your age.” He made his curious little suppressed croak of laughter which meant, she knew, that he was amused, but before she could feel hurt he pushed it over the top, teasing her.

  “Splendid,” he repeated. “I mean, on your feet all the morning, got your own teeth, hearing unimpaired—you’re a wonderful old thing for your age.”

  So. If she remembered just that it was the old Archie teasing the old Clary that would be familiar and simple. But what she discovered now, when she remembered it, was that other things seemed to have arrived, to keep on arriving with increasing density each time she went over that scene. They couldn’t be memories, because she hadn’t noticed them at all at the time—they must be her imagination—she was turning something real that had happened into something else. “I’m so sorry, darling Clary, want one?” and then looking up from the cigarettes to his eyes, pale grey, affectionate, intent upon her. This was the bit that she kept returning to and each time his exact tone of voice, the expression in his eyes, the way that his long narrow mouth twitched but did not quite smile became more sharply imprinted, bringing with it a shaft of happiness so unalloyed, so brilliant, so complete, that she lost all other senses. Recovering, she would reflect of this pure violent happiness that it was entirely new to her; in all her life she could not remember anything comparable, and yet sometimes she had thought herself happy, or else she had not thought about it at all. But then she would want more of it and play the scene again. At the time, she had not felt anything, or anything very much; affection for Archie, gratitude for being treated as a grown-up and given the chance to choose whether she had a cigarette or not. But as the weeks went by, since that weekend, she began to recognize that she had been aware of something new and strange at that moment; it was as though, for a split second, she had sensed something approaching to knock her out, as swift and powerful as a tidal wave, and somehow managed to avoid it.

  I got some jolly nice books [she wrote], all second hand, so you might have read them. Novels: Lost Horizon by James Hilton—about Tibet—Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington—about the First World War—Sparkenbroke by Charles Morgan and Evelina by Fanny Burney. Then I got Grey Wolf in a Penguin edition about someone called Mustafa Kemal and Keats’ letters and a very thin book of poems by Housman. I had to stop there because I couldn’t carry any more and Archie, who was in his uniform, says that there is a law against naval officers carrying paper parcels. I suppose you knew that, Dad.

  In the evening Archie took me to dinner with the sculptor and his Spanish wife. She isn’t actually his wife, but they live together. He is quite old (I mean older than you and Archie) and he’s Jewish, which is why he left France. He had to go to the Isle of Man at first and so did Teresa because they were foreign. She is dark and not thin at all, but rather glamorous in a fruity sort of way; she reminded me of a black cherry with long dangly earrings
. I do think earrings are pretty; it’s a pity people don’t wear them more. She cooked an amazing dish of mussels and rice and chicken: the rice was yellow and smelt and tasted delicious and we had wine. They live in one huge room that had a stove with glass doors to it. Louis, he’s called. Louis Kutchinsky. The most interesting thing about them is that they’re Communists which was very exciting as I’ve never met one before. He belongs to something called the Peace Pledge Union, but in spite of that, he’s quite keen on having us joined up with the Russians. Archie teased him about war being all right if the Russians were in it, and he said his opinions had changed since the news about what the Germans are doing to Jews in Poland, and everywhere else, he said. He said they were trying to exterminate them but they couldn’t be doing that, could they? I mean you can’t kill off a whole race of people—there must be thousands and thousands of them—how could they possibly do it, even if they were so wicked as to want to? I asked him if he was a religious Jew, and he said no, but that didn’t stop him feeling Jewish any more, he said, than an English person wouldn’t stop feeling English if they weren’t a Protestant. But mostly he and Archie talked (and he talked a jolly sight more than Archie), and I simply listened and Teresa sewed. He had a bad leg, like Archie—he got his in Spain—Archie said that between them they could run a three-legged race but he didn’t know what that was. Archie asked him what he was working on, and he said he’d given up sculpture because he had no commissions and the materials were difficult to come by so he had taken to drawing. “An encyclopaedia of hands,” he said. He showed us a whole collection of drawings, mostly done with charcoal, of hands—clasped, clenched, praying, playing the piano, just lying on a table, sometimes the backs, sometimes palms, not the same person’s hands doing those things, but all kinds. They weren’t all in charcoal, also some in pencil and some in inks of different colours. There were dozens of them, and sometimes he’d had several goes on one page. Archie looked at them for ages and he didn’t talk while Archie was looking, but I noticed he watched him all the time to see what Archie thought and I could see he minded. Occasionally, Archie asked him whose hands they were and “a pianist” “a surgeon I knew” “the woman at the paper shop” “a neighbour’s child” “anyone who will lend me their hands,” he said. At the end of looking, Archie said he admired them profoundly and it was a new kind of portraiture. When we left—which was pretty late—Mr. Kutchinsky hugged Archie and then gave him a sort of terrier shake and said: “You should come to dinner at least once a week—my audience of one.”

  Here she stopped again, remembering Archie taking her arm in the black street, walking to the King’s Road in search of a cab which did not materialize until they’d got so far, Archie said, it was easier to walk the whole way. He had told her about Louis, who he said was Hungarian, and Teresa, who he said was not married to him because she had been married when Louis met her, but her husband used to beat her up, so Louis had kidnapped her and brought her to France. They had had a child but it had died, and she couldn’t have any more, but he said they were happy together and well suited. Louis could be a demanding partner and she liked to look after him. Half of her had listened to this and half of her simply enjoyed the walk in the dark empty streets with Archie limping beside her. “So there are your first Communists,” he said. “Not so very different from other people.”

  She wrote, “Oh, by the way, Dad, he hadn’t met you. He was very sorry that he hadn’t. He said he was looking forward to meeting you after the war. I thought that was nice of him.”

  That wasn’t quite what she meant, she realized: it wasn’t nice of him to want to meet Dad; what had been—more than nice was the way in which he had accepted that after the war Dad would be there to meet. Sometimes about this, her heart failed her: it now seemed so long since he had vanished—and so long until the war could possibly come to an end. People talked about a Second Front, which meant invading France, but nothing ever happened about it, and even if it happened, it wouldn’t be the end of the war, although it might be the beginning of the end. What was it Mr. Churchill had said some time ago? “Not the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning”? She couldn’t remember exactly. The awful thing was that a lot of the time she got absolutely sick of the way the family listened to every news bulletin, and read the paper from cover to cover and then talked about what they had heard and read.

  She didn’t want to write any more. The next day she and Archie had gone to Richmond Park and then they had made lunch in his flat of tinned steak and kidney pudding—absolutely delicious, she thought. Then Archie took her to a cinema in Oxford Street that showed old French films and they saw Le Fin du Jour with Jean Gabin, who she had never seen before, a marvellous film, and she thought that going to French films might be the best way of learning French. When they reached the Corner House at Marble Arch for an early supper, she asked Archie what he thought of that.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you both learned something else besides shorthand and typing,” he said. “Polly ought to do some drawing. If she went to an art school—in the evenings, for instance—she’d meet some people or her age.” What about me? she had thought, but she hadn’t said anything about that. Instead she had found herself saying, “Polly is so beautiful, she’ll just marry someone, I think. I don’t think she wants to be a painter really.”

  And he had answered, “She is as pretty as paint, I have to agree.”

  She had asked him then if he thought that beauty or prettiness was important, and he had said that it had its place. Then he had paused and looked at her consideringly: “But what stops it becoming a lethal kind of yardstick,” he said, “is that everybody has different ideas about what constitutes either beauty or prettiness, or whatever you want to call it. It is one of nature’s little tricks for getting people to mate, but on the other hand I can’t imagine going overboard for a lady who had fourteen rings round her giraffe-like neck” (they had been looking at “Believe It or Not” by Ripley in the Sunday Express at breakfast that day).

  “That doesn’t count. That’s something people do because it’s fashionable—like tight lacing or people in China having bound feet. I meant just how they are in the first place.”

  “They don’t often stay like that, though, do they? Of course you’re right—the giraffe ladies aren’t an example. Well done, Clary. But you, for instance, permed your hair not so long ago—I must say you look far better with it straight. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t think putting stuff on your face really suits you.”

  “That’s because you’re against make-up.”

  “No. I think it does suit some people—”

  “Polly looks lovely whether she wears it or not.”

  “Yes, I agree she does. But she doesn’t need it.”

  “What you mean,” she said, suddenly feeling rather hopeless, “is that there are two kinds of people who it’s not worth doing things to—the fearfully beautiful ones and the ones like me.”

  There was a short silence. They were sitting opposite each other at the small marble-topped table and she felt hot and miserable and the horrible beginnings of tears.

  “Clary, I wouldn’t want you to be in any way different. I like you exactly as you are. You look just right to me.”

  “You must have very bad taste in people, then,” she said as rudely as she could manage.

  “That’s rather hard. Let me remind you—as I’m sure Miss Milliment would have put it because I bet you haven’t read him—of what Congreve said, or made one of his characters say, a man to a lady anyhow: ‘That she should admire him as much for the beauty he commends in her as if he himself was possessed of it.’ Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  She struggled with this for a moment: “You mean, she should admire him for having such discrimination? Well, I think you’re just trying to be tactful or something. Dad once said I was beautiful, and for a bit I jolly nearly believed him because, as you know, he has terrifically good taste in t
hings—but actually he was just trying to make me feel—less—ordinary.”

  She looked up and he was watching her.

  “And did he succeed?”

  “I told you, for a bit … I wouldn’t like you to think that I envy Poll—or grudge her being so marvellous to look at. It’s just that sometimes I wish”—she shrugged to make it seem trivial—“well, you know. I mean, people will have to fall back on my character, won’t they, which is no better than Poll’s incidentally, in fact it’s probably worse, but ordinary people have to have better characters to make up for looking ordinary. You know, like you said once about someone with a Cockney accent having to be better than someone without one to become an officer in the Navy. I’m not sure if I feel up to that.”

  She fell silent, but he went on listening, so she said: “Once, when he was about six, I was playing that game with Neville where you have to say what you would most like to be. And I said I’d like to be kind and brave. And Neville stretched his eyes as though I’d told a whopping lie and then looked at the ceiling and said he would like to be rich and pretty. And immediately I felt that that was what I wanted to be, really, I’d just made up the other things to sound good.”

  There he was—looking at her in her thoughts again, but this time was not like the other: this time his eyes, which seemed to see and to tell so much, were fixed upon her with an expression that she could not bear (for one awful second it had crossed her mind that he was sorry for her, an idea so humiliating and detestable to her that she had dismissed it utterly and at once without an alternative). What she said was: “You look extremely soppy to me. What on earth are you thinking?”

  And he had answered at once, “I was trying not to laugh.”

  She had been so grateful for this (people certainly weren’t pitying somebody while they were trying not to laugh at them) that she was able to change the subject without confusion. “Do tell me,” she had said, “all that you know about brothels. They seem only to get mentioned in fairly old books. Are they still going on? You know what our family is like about things like that. They simply will not discuss them. So I go on being none the wiser.”