The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  “You say.”

  “I could lift you out of your chair and put you on the ground.”

  “It would be no good, darling. I can’t—”

  “I know that. I just want to lie with you, hold you in my arms—be your loving and friendly lover.”

  He’d taken off his jacket to make a pillow, and then he’d lifted him up out of the chair and laid him down as gently as a leaf coming to rest. Then he’d put his arms round him over his shoulders with the miserable stumps that were what remained of his arms and cried until Richard felt that both their hearts would break. “That’s it, then,” he said, when he had stopped. He wiped his own tears from Richard’s face before he kissed him. Then he had lifted him back into his chair, picked up his jacket and taken him back to his room. That was when he realized that Tony had at last accepted that there was no future for them. A month later, he agreed to marry Nora.

  But now, with the wedding so near, he felt afraid. Not for Nora: nobody could know better than she who she was marrying; she was practical, she had nursed him for months, she could have no illusions about the prognosis. She said she loved him and he had come to believe her. They had had some pretty difficult conversations about no children, no sex, et cetera, and she had repeated steadily that she knew all that, she understood, it didn’t matter to her. “Probably harder for you,” she had said. No, he had replied: my libido seems pretty torpid. The one thing he could not bear to tell her was what he felt, still felt, for Tony. She simply thought Tony was a university friend; she was like his parents in this respect. In marrying Nora, he was doing, he hoped, the thing that would be best for everyone, but he would not betray Tony, who had continued to visit him, to care for him and about him, and who had accepted the news about his marriage with such gentle goodwill. “I do understand,” he had said. “She sounds just the right person for you. I’m glad she loves you.” He smiled then and added, “I’d have to win the pools to keep up with her.” (By then he’d been told about her family and the house at Frensham and all that.) And even that, though it could have been, was not bitterly said. Later, he said, “You’ll need a best man, won’t you?”

  “I suppose I shall.”

  “I’ll be your best man,” he said. “If you like.” He smiled a second time; and Richard wondered yet again whether he was more beautiful when he was smiling, or when he was not.

  “You’ll always be my best man,” he said before he could stop himself. “That sounds corny, doesn’t it?”

  And Tony, in their least favourite tutor’s voice, replied: “I’m very much afraid, Richard, that it does.”

  Tony was not staying in the hotel, thank goodness. His parents had taken Richard upstairs and put him to bed. This meant that he was going to have to stay in one position all night—usually someone turned him, but he hadn’t mentioned that. “You get a good night’s rest,” they said and, again, he knew that if he had gone back to live with them, they would never have had one. He lay, for what seemed like hours, making resolutions to be good to Nora, but in the end he gave up and went back to Wales with Tony.

  Christopher had been standing for about twenty minutes just inside the church where the biting cold outside was taken over by a marginally warmer, but more compelling darkness. The lights from the brass chandeliers looked yellow in the twilight dusk. It was just after two, and already the day seemed nearly over. He was the only usher; it was not a large wedding and, indeed, it looked as though the attendants would be lost in the cavernous church. He had put Mr. and Mrs. Holt in the front seats on the appropriate side. It was strange how awkward most people looked in their best clothes, he thought. Even he could see that Mrs. Holt was not given to wearing a hat, nor Mr. Holt a dark suit. The bridegroom, in a chair, was wheeled steadily up the aisle by a marvellous-looking young chap with red-gold hair, dark eyes and a limp. Compared to him, the chap in the chair—his future brother-in-law—looked rather ordinary; his face, that is: the rest of him could certainly not be called that. Aunt Villy arrived with Wills, Lydia and Neville. Lydia threw her arms round him: “I’m wearing scent,” she said; “I’m letting you smell it.” She wore a winter coat over a long yellow dress. Neville had walked purposefully up to the top of the church, while Aunt Villy, with Wills trying to squirm out of her grasp, kissed him and said how nice it was to see him again. Neville returned.

  “I suppose Nora knows he’s got no arms,” he said. “His coat is sort of draped, but you can see he hasn’t got either of them.”

  “That is a personal remark, Neville,” Lydia said in her most crushing voice.

  “Children, children. No more talking.”

  Wills, having failed to remove his hand from Villy’s, tried to sit on the ground. “When are we going to leave this place?”

  “Where’s Roland?” Christopher asked.

  “He had a sore throat and I brought Wills instead to relieve Ellen. The Duchy sent her love to you, and said you must come and stay when you have a chance to get away. We’ll find our way. You stay with Christopher, Lydia.”

  The organ began a rather meandering piece of Bach, and suddenly quite a lot of people arrived. Nurses who’d looked after Richard, his sister, who was fat and looked sad, and then the three cousins, Louise and Polly and Clary, all looking very grown-up in hats that tilted over their faces. It was lovely to see them and made him think of summers at Home Place. Then Mum with Judy, also in a dress like Lydia’s. “I’m the bridesmaid.”

  “You’re just one of them,” Lydia said.

  They eyed each other.

  “I’m wearing my seed pearls. And I’ve had a perm.”

  “I can see.” Lydia’s hair, straight and shining, the colour of dark honey, hung down to below her shoulders, held back over her forehead by a yellow velvet snood. On this perched the narrow wreath of buttercups and daisies like a natural crown. On Judy the same thing looked embarrassingly inappropriate. But Nora had chosen the colours, and decreed what the wreaths were to be made of. Feeling sorry for her, he gave Judy a clumsy hug.

  “Mind my dress,” she said.

  Mum returned to unpack the bride’s bouquet from a cardboard box.

  “She’ll be here any minute,” she said.

  Angela arrived. It was ages since he’d seen her. She wore an emerald green jacket that made her shoulders look very wide, and a very short tight skirt that showed her lovely long legs in film star stockings. She had stopped plucking her eyebrows so much, so now she looked far less disdainful, and her mouth, which was so like Mum’s, was now painted a rosy pink instead of the pillar-box red she had worn when he had last seen her.

  “You smell lovely,” he said when she kissed him (Lydia’s scent had been lavender water). “I wish you’d come last night.” She had not appeared.

  “I’m sorry, Chris. Something—came up. Where do I sit?”

  “Anywhere along that side. I’ll join you in a minute.”

  He turned back to the door, and there was his father, with Nora in her long white dress and a veil that very nearly obscured her face. He exchanged an uneasy, social smile with his father. “I say, Nora, you do look terrific!”

  She nodded—he could see her eyes glittering with excitement behind the veil. A pause, while Mum arranged the bridesmaids behind Nora, she took her father’s arm, and the organ struck up with the expected music. He could see the clergyman standing on the steps before the altar. Mum took his arm and they slipped round the side aisle to their seats, he with Angela in the second row, his mother in front.

  During the service, he wondered if she knew what she was doing. He remembered the time when she had wanted to be a nun, a “bride of Christ.” He hoped that she did not feel she was making a sacrifice—a lesser one, he supposed it would be—since Richard was not God, but possibly a sacrifice all the same. The idea of sacrifice made him feel uneasy: he felt that he would only be able to sustain a short sharp one, and Nora’s would certainly not be that: it would continue until either she or Richard died. This made him think of Oliver
—now probably about eight years old, and dogs didn’t live much above twelve or fourteen. It was no good thinking about that. Often, when he had worried about things for ages they were not as bad as he’d imagined, or sometimes they did not happen at all. Like being called up: the moment he’d decided that he ought to agree to be a soldier or something, they hadn’t wanted him. His eyesight wasn’t good enough, apart from having had all that shock treatment. So then he’d gone to work for a farmer, who was more of a market gardener really. He grew acres of vegetables, some salads and some soft fruit, and he let Christopher have the caravan he used to use for holidays to live in for a very low rent. He and his wife had got quite fond of Christopher and offered him a room in their house, but he really liked the caravan, which he had turned into a home for himself and Oliver. The farm was just outside Worthing, and he had a bike to go and buy food and anything else he needed. He lived mainly on vegetables from the farm, plus potatoes and bread. He’d become a vegetarian, as he’d decided that you couldn’t like animals as much as he did and then eat them, so he gave Oliver his meat ration. Once a week he had supper with the Hursts, otherwise he cooked on a Primus. He had an oil lamp and paraffin stove and a sleeping bag so it was quite cosy, even in winter, and Mum had given him a wireless for Christmas. He was all right. He worked hard and he didn’t mind being alone, although he realized when he saw her today, that he did miss Polly rather. Gosh, she did look marvellous walking into the church just now! Louise, whom he’d never really talked to much, looked quite old in a grey squirrel fur coat (which he didn’t approve of—it must have taken a frightening number of squirrels to make it), and Clary looked much the same as she always had only taller, and a bit silly wearing a hat, but Polly, in a coat the colour of dark blue hyacinths and with a blue straw hat tilted over her white forehead and coppery hair looked unapproachably glamorous—she had suddenly grown up so much that he felt he wouldn’t know what to talk to her about.

  Dad had left Nora now, and was walking back to sit in the front pew with Mum. It must be awful to be Richard, he thought, not having any hands and having to be grateful to people all the time. He looked at his own hands, spread out over his knees to keep his legs warm—he wasn’t used to wearing such thin clothes. Mum had exclaimed about them when she was trying to get him kitted out in Uncle Hugh’s clothes. They did look like hands that spent most of their life out of doors and did a lot of work: he couldn’t get the earth thoroughly out from under his nails, and he’d had chilblains quite badly—on his feet as well, but he was used to them by now. They got better in the spring; this was the worst time of year for them. When he’d started at the farm, he used to get blisters too, but they soon stopped. Still, they weren’t exactly hands for a party …

  They had both said their vows: he could hardly hear Richard, but Nora’s voice was clear and steady. He wondered if he would ever marry anyone; on the whole, he thought not. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to marry him, but he was pretty bad at imagining the future altogether—he couldn’t even think what it would be like when the war was over, if it ever was. Getting married if you didn’t believe in God would probably be wrong. And he was pretty sure you couldn’t marry a cousin.

  There was a general movement. Richard, with Nora, was being wheeled into the back somewhere and Mum and Dad and Richard’s parents were all following them. Soon they would all be going to some hotel for the reception, and then Nora and Richard were going to Frensham, till the end of the war, anyway, and Nora was going to earn money by nursing one or two other wounded chaps. It was quite a big house, but he supposed they’d have to live on the ground floor.

  They were coming back. He hoped it would soon be over, because it was so cold and he was extremely hungry.

  “Why wasn’t Archie there?”

  “He wouldn’t have been asked. Nora doesn’t know him, and even Aunt Jessica hardly knows him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you feeling sad too? It’s funny how sad weddings make one feel. I even felt sad after Louise’s, and that was a much starrier affair.”

  “I think this was a particularly tragic one, if you ask me.”

  “Clary, it wasn’t tragic. Nora didn’t have to marry him. She never used to do things she didn’t want, so she obviously isn’t now.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Sacrificing herself.”

  “Oh, Poll, she is! She wants to and she is. Don’t you remember, Louise said she wanted to be a nun?”

  “That was just a phase, as the aunts say. The female equivalent to wanting to be an engine driver.”

  “Neville was awful,” Clary said, following that train of thought. “He asked Richard what he did if he had an itch.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “Oh, yes, he did. I told him he was both callous and tactless and he said if he was like that, he’d rather people asked him questions about it than pretended he was just like everyone else. But, of course,” she ended loftily, “he can’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to be Richard.”

  “Well, I haven’t. If I try to think about it, my thoughts just black out. I can’t imagine that life would be worth living at all. Poor Richard! Goodness, isn’t it lucky that something like that didn’t happen to Archie?”

  “I think crashes out of aeroplanes must be the worst. Look at that poor chap Zoë used to look after at Mill House.”

  “Does she still do it?”

  “I don’t think so. I think he may have gone back to his other hospital. What shall we do this evening?”

  “We’d be warmest in a cinema. I’m not hungry after all those sandwiches and things. We could ring up Archie,” she said, as though it was a thought that had just occurred to her.

  Clary looked at her consideringly. “We could … I expect he’ll be busy though—probably not worth it—”

  “We could at least try,” Polly said as Clary knew she would.

  So they rang up Archie who said it was far too cold to go out, but as his flat was nice and warm, why didn’t they come and have supper in it? “I know how awful it is after weddings,” he said. “One does so need cheering up about ordinary life.”

  “Honey, the best thing you could do is to stop crying and tell me about it.”

  He handed her a glass of bourbon and a handkerchief.

  She blew her nose gratefully. “I really don’t know why I am. It was a wedding, after all.”

  “Find out,” he said comfortably, settling beside her on the sofa.

  “Of course,” she said, “people often cry at weddings. And it isn’t even as though I’m particularly fond of Nora. We never got on very well. She thought I was frivolous, and I thought she was a prig. She was awfully bossy, too. She told me once (it was supposed to be a secret) that she was going to be a nun and I just thought what a relief not to have her about criticizing my character all the time. The only times we ever ganged up were when Daddy was really awful to Christopher. He used to bully him and nag Mummy. I come from an awful family, I can tell you. Snobbish, and always trying to keep up appearances. But my father never earned any money much, and poor Mummy had to do the cooking and everything, which wasn’t at all what she was brought up to. And by the time Dad’s aged aunt died and left him the house and quite a lot of money, she was too old to enjoy it. Anyway, Dad expected Christopher to be a war hero and Nora and me to make good marriages.”

  “And what would that mean? Marrying into your Royal Family, that kind of thing?”

  “Not quite that. But a title, or someone like my cousin Louise married—you know, famous.”

  “Golly! Well, I suppose parents are always ambitious for their children—”

  “It didn’t work in our case. Christopher works on a farm, and Nora has married a paraplegic—”

  “And you are having an affair with an American who is old enough to be your father.”

  “Oh, they don’t know that!” she said. “I mean, it’s not because you’re American, or anything, it’s the having an affai
r part that they wouldn’t like. People of their generation simply don’t have affairs.” She had begun to blush.

  He put a bear-like arm round her thin shoulders.

  “American people of their generation sometimes have affairs, as you know,” he said. “It’s possible you don’t know everything about them.”

  She leant back against the warm wall of his shoulder. “I’m sure it’s different in America. And the war and everything.”

  “You haven’t told me why Nora’s wedding made you cry.”

  “Oh! No. I suppose—it was really all the things that it wasn’t. She wore a white dress and veil, and Judy and Lydia—that’s another cousin—were bridesmaids. But when it was over, and she was walking down the aisle, she tried to wheel his chair, but the best man wouldn’t let her. He was right, of course, it really would have looked like a nurse with her patient if she’d done that. But it was so sad! Her eyes filled with tears. I mean, she’ll never be able to—to have children. She’ll always just have to look after him.”

  “Perhaps she loves him,” he said. “Perhaps she loves him and knows he needs her and she wants to be needed.”

  “You always look on the bright side.”

  “No. I’m just pointing out to you, honey, that there may be one.”

  “But supposing she finds someone else, some time in the future and falls in love with him?”

  “That can happen to anyone.”

  “Oh, darling, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

  “That was all a long time ago, and I know you didn’t.”