The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Hugh, listening to the six o’clock news in his rather dusty drawing room (three Germans had been hanged at Kharkhov for war crimes), stubbed out his cigarette and said he was sure he could find something to fit Christopher, and why didn’t she leave it to them to kit him out and would she like a drink?

  “You are an angel. I’d love a drop of whisky if you have any.”

  “Help yourself. Where is Christopher?”

  “Right at the top of the house, I’m afraid. But give him a shout: he’ll come down to your room.”

  But she had hardly started to pour herself a cautious tot from the half bottle of Johnnie Walker when she heard the wail of dismay that undoubtedly came from Judy, sent earlier to have a bath.

  “Mum! Mum! Oh, please come, Mum!

  “I’m in here.” She opened the bathroom door and, the moment that Jessica stepped inside, locked it behind her. “I don’t want Uncle Hugh or Christopher to see me.”

  She was half in, half out of her yellow net bridesmaid’s dress, struggling to pull the bodice down amid ominous splitting noises.

  “It’s too small, Mummy, I can’t get into it.”

  “Stand still. Silly girl, you probably didn’t undo the back. Stand still.”

  But even when she had levered it back over Judy’s head, undone the hooks and eyes at the back and tried again, the dress was palpably too small.

  “It’s stupid! It’s not my fault! I hate pink, anyway.”

  “It must be the dress made for Lydia, which means that she has got yours. Don’t worry. I’ll ring up Aunt Villy and we’ll get them changed over. We’ll have to mend it, though. I wish you’d waited and not tried to cram yourself into it.”

  “If I had, it would have been too late to change. Lydia would have gone off to church in mine, and I would have had to go in my beastly school uniform! It is unfair.”

  A great deal of Judy’s conversation was conducted as though she was a child actress in a melodrama, Jessica thought, trying not to be irritated. Judy was going through a difficult phase, as her mother used to say. The school diet, presumably largely carbohydrate, had turned her into a pudding—a rather spotty one at that. She had grown a great deal during the last year, but that had not stopped her being podgy; her hair was always greasy, the down on her upper lip which had upset her so much in the summer had since been treated with peroxide by her faithful friend Monica with the result that it now glinted like brass shavings above which acne rioted. Of course, she would outgrow all these little disadvantages, Jessica thought, and meanwhile it was so lucky that, by and large, she seemed unaware of them.

  “Put on your Sunday dress,” she said, “and do tidy up the bathroom. It looks like a cross between an old clothes shop and a swamp.”

  “Mummy, you sound just like Miss Blenkinsopp at school. My Sunday dress is tight under the arms as well,” she added.

  “I’ll see if I can let it out, but I can’t do that for this evening. Now, mop up the floor and take all your clothes and put them in your room. Leave the bathroom as you would wish to find it.”

  “All right. Did you remember to bring my seed pearls?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my christening present brooch?”

  “Yes. Now get on.”

  Questions of this kind pursued her as she made her escape upstairs to change for the restaurant dinner.

  Of course she was glad that Nora was getting married: she had thought for a long time that this would be unlikely. In fact, she had thought that of her four children it was Nora who would end up an old maid—matron of a hospital, perhaps. But seeing Christopher after rather a long gap—he seldom came home, and had never come to London when she lived there—she wondered about his future as well. He was desperately thin and did not look happy. He had not been called up, partly because of his earlier breakdown and the electric shock treatment he had undergone, but also because he had turned out to be very short-sighted and now wore glasses with very thick lenses. He had a high colour from working so much out of doors and his face always had minute scars where he had cut himself shaving. Almost his first question when he arrived had been “Is Dad here?” and when she had told him that he would not be arriving until the next day he had nodded, but she had seen the instant gleam of relief. Raymond had not been much of a success as a father: the three older children, although they did not feel the same, in their various ways had written him off—Angela despised him, Nora patronized him, but Christopher still dreaded and feared him. Only Judy was able to turn him into darling Daddy, doing very secret and important war work; Jessica could easily imagine that a certain amount of competition went on at school about fathers, and Judy’s best friend Monica’s father was a squadron leader and, vicariously, the source of all Judy’s information about the war. “Monica’s father says they had no business releasing Oswald Mosley from prison,” she had written last term from school. “He says it is absolutely outrageous.” To compete with this sort of thing, Judy had probably turned her father into a secret agent. She must tell Raymond that, it might amuse him.

  Three miles away, Richard Holt was having what his best friend, his doctor, his parents and his sister kept calling his “stag night.” Probably the most sedate affair of its kind there had ever been, he thought a trifle wearily. His back was hurting: the dope he’d had before dinner had worn off and he longed to be lying down flat, but they were just about to embark upon the dessert. He looked across the table to Tony, who instantly met his eye, so he smiled, and Tony smiled back, the sweetest smile—it made Richard feel better just to look at him.

  “Richard would like chocolate mousse,” his mother was saying.

  “I’d like to choose, though,” he said, making an effort to sound greedy and interested.

  “Of course, darling,” and she laid the menu in front of him.

  “Creamed rice, apple pie, cheese and biscuits,” he read.

  “And chocolate mousse.”

  “And chocolate mousse. You’re right. I’m a customer for that.”

  His chair was next to his mother’s so that she could feed him. From tomorrow, Nora would be doing that, he thought, three times a day for ever. Before he was wounded, he had enjoyed food: in Suffolk, where his parents lived, they had a farm and the food had been plain but good. Apart from their own lamb, he used to go wild fowling; duck and geese had been on the menu and, in winter, hares that his mother had jugged or roasted or put into pies. In the Army he hadn’t thought about food; it was simply fuel and a time when you could take the weight off your feet. But eighteen months of being fed everything with a spoon, food that was half cold anyway by the time it reached the ward, by a succession of nurses for whom the practice seemed to bring out latent, maternal and bossy feelings—whenever he said he had had enough it was “one more to please me” stuff—had really put him off food (although it was supposed to be an event in the patient’s day). Drinks were OK because he could have them through a straw and not be dependent upon anyone.

  They were a small family party, just his parents, his sister—widowed early in the war, but left with the twins (not present)—and Tony, who was to be his best man. He would not have asked him, but Tony had offered. The offer had been the last—golden—straw of his generosity and love.

  The chocolate mousse had arrived. His mother was smoothing the napkin spread over his knees.

  “I’m not very hungry,” he said, meaning please don’t make him eat all of it.

  “You just have what you want,” she said comfortably. “There’s no sense in cramming food down you that you don’t want.” Her eyes, which had bleached from an intense blue to something paler than forget-me-not, had the same expression that he remembered as a child, a blend of wisdom and innocence that somehow went well with her weatherbeaten face—all fine wrinkles, like a brownish apple. Described by herself and his father as something of a tomboy when young (although in those days it had probably not meant more than not liking to ride side-saddle and refusing to wear stays), she looked
as though she had made the most of what she knew and had learned, but her very innocence had always regulated the knowledge. Now in her early sixties, and with what she described as only a touch of angina, she was retiring gently from her hitherto active life. He could not possibly have imposed himself upon her.

  “It’s a pity Nora couldn’t have been with us,” his sister was saying.

  “Oh, Susan, you know it’s bad luck for the bride and groom to meet on the eve of their wedding.”

  “I do, but it is still a pity. It’s all very well for you, Dad, you’ve met her—I haven’t.”

  “She’s a wonderful girl,” his father said, not at all for the first time.

  Wonderful to marry an old crock like me, Richard thought, when they had finally got him to bed. But how she had wanted to! He had met her when they had first started trying to operate on his back. She had come on duty one evening when he was sleepless and the pain was driving him mad and he was counting the minutes—a hundred and ten of them before he could have his next dose. She had known at once that he was desperate, had brought him a couple of pills with a hot drink, and propped him up while he drank it. Then she had rearranged his various pillows so that when she lowered him down again it all felt different and far more comfortable. “I’ll be back when I’ve done the round,” she said. “Just to see if we’ve got the pillows right for you.” She had been gentle, assured, deft and wonderful, uncheery. A first-rate nurse. She never seemed in a hurry, as many of them did, and nothing was too much trouble. That had been the beginning of it. Months later, he had asked her how she had managed to give him a dose of pain-killer out of hours, as it were. “They weren’t pain-killers,” she said. “It was just some arnica in pill form. You needed to feel that something was being done.”

  By then, they knew each other quite well. When, after months, the time came for him to be moved to another home—that’s what it was called, but really it was a hospital—and he told her, she went completely silent. She’d been pushing his chair round the grounds: it was her day off and they often spent it that way. He sensed, although he could not see her behind him, that she was upset, and when they reached the huge tree that had a wooden seat round it, she stopped the chair and sat down—sort of collapsed.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said. This was true.

  “Will you, Richard? Will you really?”

  “Of course. I can’t imagine what it will be like without you.” This was not quite true: he could, but he felt she needed to hear it.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear her. Then she proposed to him, the last thing he expected—or wanted, come to that. He was both touched and appalled.

  “Dear Nora. I’m not the marrying kind,” he said. “I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”

  “I could look after you!”

  “I know you could. But that wouldn’t be a marriage.”

  She started to speak, but then she suddenly put her face in her hands and wept. That was awful, because he couldn’t put out a hand to comfort her—he couldn’t do a damn thing.

  “Don’t,” he said after a while. “Don’t. I can’t bear you to cry—just sit here and watch you cry.”

  She stopped at once. “Sorry. I see it’s not fair. Not fair to you, I mean. I had to tell you, though. Because you might have felt—well, even if you had thought it was a good idea, you might have thought I wouldn’t—anyway, I wanted you to know that I do love you.”

  That was the first conversation about it. He went to the new place, and she came to see him on her days off. The funny thing was he did miss her. She always seemed to know what he needed: she would read to him for hours if he wanted; she asked him about his childhood, his family, and one day she met his parents when they made the long journey to visit him. After they had left she asked him who was Tony. (They had asked whether Tony had managed to visit him, and he had said yes, but very seldom.) He was just a friend, he had said.

  “I thought it might be an old girl-friend. You know, people sometimes call girls called Antonia Tony.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, and he sensed how hard she was trying to be light about it. “I haven’t got a rival, then.”

  He could never tell her about Tony. She knew after that that Tony visited him occasionally—took trouble not to come on the same day. “Nicer for you to space your visitors out,” she had said. Tony could hardly ever come, anyway. His work took him all over the country: since he’d been invalided out of the Army, where he’d been trained as an electrical engineer, he’d got the job of servicing plant in factories. He had told Tony that there was no point in his writing, because his letters had to be read to him, but he did send postcards, and when he did come, he pushed the chair through the grounds and well out of sight so that they could feel as much as possible alone together. It was ironical, really, that they’d met because they were both such good athletes, that they were either in the same top team or competing, although differences emerged: Tony, for instance, was a sprinter, and he was long distance. Tony had copped it before he did, but he had ended up with comparatively minor damage; he now walked with a pronounced limp and had trouble with his lungs. When he was better they had spent Richard’s leave together—ten unforgettable days in North Wales. It had rained almost all the time and even now he regarded rain with affection.

  Shortly afterwards, he’d had his crash—prang, they called it in the RAF. Anyway, he’d crashed after being attacked by fighter aircraft, and a bullet had got him in the spine, so he couldn’t use his parachute. All his other injuries had been from the crash: it was a miracle he had survived at all, they had said. He’d been unconscious—came to in a hospital bed, full of dope, disembodied; to begin with he thought he was dead and that this was the beginning of something else. It was some time before he realized, and they told him, how badly he had been hurt, and much longer before he had a chance to tell Tony. That was the first time that he understood what a lot hands had to do with affection and love: he could not touch, comfort or reassure Tony—just had to lie there and tell him. It would make no difference, Tony had said at once, none at all. At twenty-three, Richard believed that he would have said the same. But he was ten years older and, even then, the full implications of his state had not come home to him. He had been able to think that when he was better, he would need less nursing—would become more independent somehow or other. It was only as the months dragged by that he recognized this would never be so to any significant degree. Even so, he had not been able to disillusion Tony, or had not been able to bear to, since he was terrified that this might mean he would never see Tony again. But when they had discharged him from the original place and moved him to the second hospital, he knew what his options were. His parents wanted him to go home: his mother said she would look after him; “I’m sure they would show me what I need to do,” she had said, “and your father would help me with the lifting.” But he had known that this was out of the question. He would not, could not expect Tony to take it all on: he would be prevented from having any career, any job, even, any friends, any fun, and, last, but by no means least, any sex. He could not allow someone of twenty-four to commit themselves to that, could not condemn that faithful and loving heart to such an inevitable betrayal. Tony had been a Dr. Barnardo’s boy: he had lived in institutions all his life, had never had family affection, let alone love, until he had met him, Richard. It was his first love: he would get over it. These resolutions had coincided with Nora’s proposal. At first he had dismissed the idea as preposterous: he did not love her; he was not in a position to contract to a partnership of any kind with anyone. Much safer to stick to the institutional life, where nothing was expected of him, and where people were paid to see that he got from one day to the next. But his views, his opinions, his resolutions, seemed to make as little difference to Nora’s feelings as they did to Tony’s. There began to be a pattern to Tony’s visits. Tony would talk about their future, and argue with him whe
n he said that they wouldn’t be having one—sometimes this would get to be nearly a row. Then he would make an effort to change the subject; there would be silences, filled inexorably by intense longing, by memories of fulfilment, which was all, he realized, that now they could ever have, and they would look at each other and there was nothing to say. And then, one afternoon at one of these times, Tony said: “There’s one thing I’d like. Just once.”