“It means you don’t have to do anything you don’t like.”
“But what does it mean?”
He hadn’t the slightest idea, but he was damned if he would let her know that.
“There is a South American snake,” he began in his lecture voice, “extremely poisonous called a Fer de Lance. It comes from that. The snake only bites people if he feels like it, you see.”
She knew that he was extremely interested in snakes and read everything he could find about them, so she accepted this at once. “I expect in France a freelance would actually be fer de lance,” she said. “I shall ask Miss Milliment.”
“I shouldn’t, if I were you. Miss Milliment’s knowledge of reptiles has always struck me as rudimentary.” He was using another voice now—a master at his school, probably. She wanted to point out to him that to copy unknown people’s voices wasn’t very funny, but she wanted to keep on the right side of him because then he might waive her doing the extra bucket.
“What do you think of Mussolini?”
“I hardly ever think of him and, anyway, now he’s deposed he doesn’t count any more. Listen, I’ve got an idea.”
Her heart sank. She knew it would be to do with Mr. Wren. It was.
“I’m going to creep up the ladder into the hayloft, and if he’s asleep, I’m going to give him a little squirt from the hose and ask him why he isn’t carrying water to the horses. You can watch.”
“Supposing he isn’t asleep? He might …” She mouthed the rest of the sentence, “he might be listening to us.” She imagined him listening, smiling his grim, tight little smile and getting ready to pounce on Neville as he reached the top of the ladder … “He might topple you off,” she said.
“I’ll be careful. I’ll call out to him first. If he answers, I won’t go right up the ladder.”
“Let’s finish our job first.” Perhaps by then it would be tea-time, and Neville was always hungry so he wouldn’t miss that.
“You can go on, if you want to.” He got off the block and picked up the hose. The stable door was ajar. He pushed it open and disappeared into the gloom.
“Mr. Wren! I say, Mr. Wren!”
She heard him calling. There was a silence. She got off the block and followed him.
“Unwind the hose for me, I’m going up.”
She did as she was told, and then her fear prompted her to look in the loose-boxes in case Mr. Wren was hiding in one of them. But they were bare except for an old nest in one of the iron mangers bracketed to the wall. The walls were whitewashed and laced with ambitious cobwebs, as big as fishing nets at Hastings; they had not been repainted for a long time. She looked into all four boxes. Each had a small round window placed high in the wall—no good for a horse to look out—and most of the glass was cracked and dirty; a dusty twilight prevailed. She could hear that Neville had reached the top of the ladder: his footsteps were loud on the boards of the loft above.
“He’s not here,” he called. “He must be out. Take the hose, could you?”
Going back to the foot of the ladder, she noticed the tack room door. It was shut: he might easily be there. As he took the hose she pointed silently to the tack room and then moved towards the stable door so that she could escape if Mr. Wren suddenly pounced out at them. But he didn’t.
When Neville was down again, he regained the hose. “I bet that’s where he is all the time,” he said.
The latch on the door was stiff and creaked as he lifted it.
“Yes! He’s asleep, as usual.”
She joined him, staying in the doorway. The tack room had a brick floor. There was a small iron grate with a mantelpiece on which was propped a cracked mirror. The walls beside it had faded rosettes pinned to them that Louise would have won in her gymkhana days. The window had a piece of sacking nailed over it, but some of it had rotted so that it only made half of a curtain. The room had a different smell from the rest of the stables: damp leather and musty old clothes. Mr. Wren lay on a camp bed in the far corner. He was partly covered by a horse blanket, but his legs, covered in brown leather gaiters and dark toffee-coloured boots, stuck out.
“Mr. Wren!” Neville said in a teasing voice.
“Neville, don’t—” she began to say, but it was too late. He gave her one of his bland, gleaming looks that she knew meant total defiance, squeezed the trigger on the hose and played it lightly over the reclining figure. It did not move.
“He is fast asleep,” Neville said, but he let her take the hose from him.
But she had gone right up to the bed.
“He isn’t,” she said. “His eyes are wide open. Do you think he’s possibly—you know—dead?”
“Gosh! I don’t know. He doesn’t look pale enough. Feel him.”
“You do it.”
He leaned over and put his hand gingerly on the old man’s forehead. There were drops of water on it, but the skin felt cold. “I’d better try and feel his pulse,” he said, trying to sound calm, but his voice was shaking. He pulled the blanket back: Wren lay in his dirty striped collarless shirt, his braces hitched to his breeches; his right hand was clutching a yellowing piece of paper. When Neville picked up his wrist, the piece of paper slipped sideways and they saw it was an old photograph out of a newspaper of their grandfather on a horse whose bridle was held by a young man in a tweed cap. “Mr. William Cazalet on Ebony with his groom,” it said. His wrist, just bones with skin round them, was cold as well. When he let go, it dropped back onto the bed so quickly that it almost made him start. Tears rushed to his eyes.
“He must be dead,” he said.
“Oh, poor Mr. Wren! He must have died awfully suddenly if he didn’t even have time to shut his eyes.” Lydia was crying, which he was glad of because it stopped him.
“We must go and tell them,” he said.
“I think we ought to say a prayer for him first. I think the people who find people who are dead ought to do something like that.”
“Well, you can stay and pray if you like, I’m going to find Aunt Rach.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think I will,” she said hastily. “I’ll come with you and pray on the way.”
They found Aunt Rach and told her and she and Villy went to see him and then Dr. Carr came and then a black van from Hastings took Mr. Wren away, and during all this Neville and Lydia were told to keep out of the way, “have a nice game of tennis or squash or something.” This infuriated both of them. “When will they stop treating us as though we were children?” Lydia exclaimed in her most die-away grown-up’s voice.
“If it hadn’t been for us he might have stayed there for days and weeks and months. Even possibly years. Until he was just a skeleton in his clothes,” Neville said, and immediately wondered where the rest of him went.
“Actually, they would have found out because Edie takes him a plate of dinner with a lid on it every day. She would have noticed the plates piling up,” Lydia said. She was wondering what happened to the body part of people. But I shan’t ask Neville, she thought. She bet he wouldn’t know, and would simply make something horrible up. By mutual consent, they went through the green baize door to the kitchen, where they regaled the servants—a most satisfactory audience—with an extremely dramatic account of the affair.
“… and what we were both wondering,” Neville said when eventually they could think of nothing more to tell, “is how do you shut a dead person’s eyes?”
Mrs. Cripps said that she didn’t think that was a very nice question, but Lizzie, in her rather hoarse whisper, used when she (rarely) conversed in front of Mrs. Cripps, said that you put pennies on their eyelids.
A really useful thing to know, Lydia said, when they were washing their hands for supper, but Neville said not awfully, because they didn’t come across dead people very often.
“I’m thirteen,” he said, “nearly, and this is the first one I’ve ever met. And Clary hasn’t ever. She will be mad with jealousy.”
Lydia, who had been feeling it for some time, said that she was
shocked by how heartless he was being about poor Mr. Wren.
“I’m not actually heartless, but I have to admit that I don’t feel very heartful about him. I’m sorry for him he’s dead, but I don’t feel sorry for me, that is.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Lydia said. “He did go about in a sort of silent bad temper most of the time. But Mummy says that he was awfully sad about the Brig having a car instead of horses to go about on. Especially when the Brig got too blind to go riding. I can see that those sort of things blighted his life.”
His funeral happened a week later, and the Brig and the Duchy and Rachel and Villy all went to it.
In September, it was time for Zoë to make the visit to her mother in the Isle of Wight again. She went every three months, stayed three or four days, or a week if she could bear it. In the spring and summer, she took Juliet, but as Juliet grew older, taking her became more of a problem. Her mother could not deal with a small active child for more than about half an hour, and Jules, at three, was far too young to be left to herself, so Zoë found it increasingly difficult to divide her time between them to the satisfaction of either.
This time, Ellen had agreed to look after her, and Villy was going to be there to keep an eye on things.
“I’ll only stay three days,” Zoë said.
The Duchy had once suggested that Zoë might like to have her mother stay at Home Place, but Zoë—appalled at the idea—had quickly said that her mother couldn’t travel so far alone, and that if she, Zoë, was going to fetch her, she might as well stay with her, and the Duchy, who understood perfectly that for some reason Zoë did not want her mother to come, and also knew that the older one got the less one wanted to move from familiar surroundings, had immediately desisted.
Now she had packed—winter nightdress because Cotter’s End, the cottage that she was going to owned by Mummy’s friend Mrs. Witting, was always cold, hot water bottle because the bed she slept in there seemed most of the year to be damp—she had never got over her first visit when steam had risen from it after she had put her bottle into it—a packet of ginger biscuits (meals were dainty in the extreme) and a mac in case any of the windy walks she went for when she felt the need to escape were wet. She had also a box of marshmallows for her mother whose favourite sweet they had always been. She took sewing and knitting and Anna Karenina, a novel that Rupert had introduced her to just before he had been called up and that she had, to her surprise, enjoyed very much. She always took some such book with her on these occasions to absorb her during the long evenings after her mother and Maud had gone to bed. She took a bottle of sherry for Maud, as every time she went a small sherry party was arranged so that she could be shown off to neighbours and friends. This occasion entailed a dress and a precious pair of stockings—she only had two unworn pairs left.
The case, when full, was horribly heavy and, with the war, there were hardly any porters, but Tonbridge carried it for her onto the train to London.
It was a relief to be on her way. Leaving Jules was always hard; when she had been smaller, Jules had hardly noticed, it was she who had suffered. Now, in fact all of this year, Jules minded if she even went to London for the day, although Ellen said that she settled down very quickly afterwards. And with Wills and Roly, she really wasn’t an only child. Although she will be my only child, I suppose, she thought. The prospect of being on her own for several uninterupted hours on end, practically the only aspect of these journeys that she looked forward to, had begun: she could afford the luxury of thinking only of herself, in terms that various members of the Cazalet family would brand either selfish, or morbid, or both. What was to become of her? She was twenty-eight: she could not spend the rest of her life at Home Place, working as a part-time amateur nurse, looking after Jules, helping the Duchy, making and mending clothes, washing, ironing, looking after the invalids of the house—the Brig and Aunt Dolly—listening to interminable bulletins of news about the war on the wireless. The war, which everyone said was likely to be over in a year or two, would finish some time after the Second Front was launched, although nobody expected that to be before next spring; however, the end, which had once seemed unimaginable, was definitely in sight. What should she do then? Years of adapting herself to the continuous warm throb of family life that her in-laws seemed to find so natural and necessary, had sapped her initiative: the thought of going back to the house in Brook Green on her own with Jules seemed bleak. For she no longer expected that Rupert would come back, and in the train, she felt free to acknowledge this. At home, she was surrounded by people who, even if they secretly agreed with her, could not admit it; if by nothing else, they were all in thrall to Clary’s unwavering faith that he was alive. This could only stop with the end of the war, when he did not come back and even Clary would have to believe that he was dead. She had, of course, felt a wonderful relief when that Frenchman had brought the news of him, and the messages for her and Clary. She had wept with excitement and joy. But that was two years ago—two years without a sign that he was still alive. This summer the head of the French Resistance had been tortured to death by the Gestapo. It had been on the nine o’clock news; nobody had said a word, but the room became full of unnameable anxieties. She remembered wondering how long anyone would continue to hide him if being found out meant that they risked torture before death. Clary had not been present on this occasion.
Since then, she had tried, and usually succeeded, to put all thoughts of him out of her mind. She would never, never have admitted this to any of the family, as she knew they would either not believe her, or would think that she was unnaturally cold and selfish. Perhaps she was, she now thought. But the fact remained that she was in what seemed to her an interminable limbo: she was not a widow, nor what the family, satirizing the Brig, called a splendid little woman whose husband was a prisoner of war. She might be any of these, indeed, must by the nature of things be one of them, but what could she do or feel when she did not know which? So she had taken refuge in the present, the minutiae of daily wartime life that was full enough of mundane problems to occupy and fatigue her. Her escape had become reading novels—preferably long, old ones. There were a number of them to be found in the house, carelessly stuffed into shelves all over the place; they had never been arranged and nobody knew where any particular book might be, except the girls who had their own bookshelves in their room, so each novel she read was a discovery, sometimes deeply enjoyable, sometimes almost unreadably dull. As, to begin with, she had the simple idea that all these books, being classics, must therefore be good, she was confounded by the struggle she had to get through some of them. A conversation with Miss Milliment, however, altered this sweeping view: through her she discovered that the nineteenth century had its crop of pot boilers, books that Miss Milliment described as being like the curate’s egg (did she not know that saying? it meant good in parts), novels that had been admired for their sociological significance, as well as some masterpieces, “although, sometimes, masterpieces, as I’m sure you know, can also be boring.” After that, she would ask Miss Milliment about the books she found, before she embarked upon them. “One has also to remember,” she had remarked in her gentle, diffident voice, “that even very good writers will produce work of varying quality, so you may admire one novel very much and feel nothing for another.” She wondered whether, if there had not been a war, and if Rupert had not gone away, she would ever have found out that she enjoyed reading novels—probably not.
Archie had asked her to lunch with him on her way through London, but she had some shopping to do for her mother and it had been arranged that she should lunch with him on her homeward journey instead. It would be nice to have Archie to herself, she thought, and really exciting to lunch in a restaurant. She had packed her new green tweed skirt and the jumper she had made to match it for the occasion. She liked Archie, although she did not find him attractive—thank goodness, she thought now, because falling in love with one’s husband’s best friend would obviously be a v
ery stupid thing to do and ever since the ghastly incident (it had shrunk, with time, to that) with Philip Sherlock, she had shied away from the very idea of flirting with anyone. No, Archie was almost family now; he knew all about everybody because they all confided in him: he alone knew that she thought Rupert was dead and did not make her feel either guilty or heartless about it.
In order to buy the particular bust bodices and camisoles that her mother wanted, she had to go either to Ponting’s in Kensington High Street, or to Gaylor and Pope in Marylebone. Her mother had said that if one shop did not have what she wanted, the other was almost certain to, presenting the alternative as though this would make the task easier. In fact, the shops were so far apart that without a car she would not have time to visit both: she chose Ponting’s because she could go all the way there on a number nine bus, a long ride that cost fourpence. She left her luggage at Charing Cross. Kensington Gardens looked far larger and more like a country park with all its iron railings gone. She remembered the boring walks that she had occasionally been taken on by a collection of people whose names she could hardly remember who looked after her when her mother was at work, and then wondered whether she would take Jules there—to sail a boat, perhaps, on the Round Pond, or to feed birds at the Serpentine. But I expect I’ll have to have a job of some kind, she thought. The parallel between her mother’s life and her own struck her now with a sudden force. There had been glancing blows before, but she had managed to ward them off: now her own life seemed horribly to imitate her mother’s in every respect. Her mother had been widowed in the last war. She, Zoë, had been the only child. When her mother had finally retired from the cosmetics firm for which she had worked for nearly twenty years, she had received three hundred pounds and a silver tray meant for the use of calling cards. She remembered her mother’s pathetic attempts at finding some male companionship (no doubt, with the hope of marriage), and her own stony sabotage of them. Ever since Zoë could remember, her mother had always, as she used to call it, “fussed” over her, making her clothes, brushing her hair a hundred times every night, teaching her to look after her appearance, sending her to schools that, looking back on it, she must have found it a struggle to afford, and then, when Zoë had married Rupert, selling the small mansion flat which had been their home and moving to an even smaller one. And she, who had grown up taking everything her mother gave her for granted, had also grown up as much in love with her own appearance as her mother could ever have been with it. Her mother had brought her up to feel that she was the important one, the beauty who would go far. At school, it had been much the same. The other girls had envied her her lovely clear skin, her shining hair that curled naturally, her long legs and her green eyes; they had envied her but she had also been adored—spoiled—given the best parts in the plays at the end of term, introduced to parents visiting the school; some besotted girls had even offered to do her maths homework. She must not bring Jules up like that, she thought. Jules must go to a school where she would learn things. Four years of living with the Cazalet family had taught her that they counted appearance as nothing at all; it was never referred to, and with the Duchy, at least, there was the inference that vanity about one’s looks or indeed anything else, was out of the question. She thought of Jules, who had the same thick, shining dark hair, the same creamy skin, the same slanting, moth-like eyebrows. Only her eyes were different as they were blue, like Rupert’s, like most of the Cazalets’. She had been, and was now, the prettiest baby Zoë had ever seen, but that made no difference in the family. Ellen called her a little madam when she had her tempers; she was treated exactly the same as Wills and Roly. “How would you like it if someone took your teddy and threw it out of the window?” she had heard Ellen saying one day. “You’d be cross, wouldn’t you, and it would make you cry. Well, you mustn’t do things to other people that you know you would not like them to do to you.” Nobody had ever said anything like that to her. If I hadn’t met Rupert and all his family, I might never have grown up at all, she thought. She felt so different from the spoiled, vain, shallow nineteen-year-old who had married Rupert. Now, in two years, she would be thirty, her youth would be gone and nobody would want to marry a middle-aged woman with a child—thirty had always seemed to her the beginning of middle age.
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