The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  But at different intervals during the rest of the evening—while they got ready to go out to dinner, while they were dancing (he was a very good dancer), while they stood outside in the freezing cold waiting for the taxi he had ordered, when she fell asleep in the cab while he was holding her, when they were standing in the small lift on their way to his fourth-floor flat, when he had opened the door and they were assailed by the (to him comfortingly familiar, to her delightfully exotic) odours of the Chesterfield cigarettes that he chain-smoked and the Mary Chess scent of “White Lilac” that he had had posted to her from New York, when they had got to bed and he had made love to her, when he had given her a final kiss and reached out to switch off the bedside lamp that he put on the floor to make the light more cosy and romantic and she had turned her smooth bony back to him for sleep—during that whole evening Elaine Black thrust her way out of the past to confront them. Angela saw her as a large, dark-eyed woman with raven black hair and dazzling white skin, bosomy and with a low husky voice. He knew her to be small, red-haired, short-sighted and shrill. “A good girl,” his mother had said when he had brought her home. “A well-brought-up girl.” Her very plainness had appealed to his mother; certainly her appearance in no way prepared him for her going off with another man, a man he had never met or even heard of, a step she had taken with no warning or intimation even of dissatisfaction with her married state or with him as a husband. And then, two years afterwards, he heard that she had died—so suddenly that he thought it must have been an automobile accident, but in fact it had been a sudden and violent onset of diabetes. It wasn’t until she died that he realized that he had never loved her and began to feel guilty. Eight years they had been together, and he had never known what she really thought or felt about anything, except that she had minded being unable to have children. He had been working his ass off during those years, first as a medical student, and then, after he’d qualified, in the big hospital in the Bronx. She’d worked as a receptionist for a psychiatrist but, even so, they’d been very short of cash. After Elaine had left, he’d decided that he didn’t know enough about people and that was when he’d decided to qualify in psychiatry. Analysis had taught him how much of his life had been dictated by being his mother’s son, and it was only when she died—just before Pearl Harbor—that he’d been able to accept that she’d done her best for him according to her lights. Her death had released him from the relentless campaign she had waged to find him another, more suitable, wife (Elaine’s shares had dropped dramatically with her failure to produce a grandchild). By then, he was going quite well: had moved to a larger apartment in a better part of the city, shared a receptionist with two colleagues and enjoyed one or two unmemorable affairs (though never with patients). But Elaine’s departure continued to haunt him: if she had not died, he might have been able to seek her out and talk to her, though he was never sure whether he would have taken the considerable trouble involved to find her and, if he had, whether she would have agreed to such an amiable post-mortem. As it was, the thought of her always provoked the sensation of unfinished business between them, and this, for reasons he could understand but not quell, induced guilt. Joining the Army, coming to England with the prospect of invading France, had made him feel free, isolated, and to begin with, and outside the context of the job, irresponsible. At first, although London seemed to be full of girls, he remained lonely. He went out on evenings with fellow officers where they ate the terrible food and watched couples dancing. Sometimes the others brought girls, and once a girl for him, but they hadn’t hit it off: she told him dirty stories that made him feel embarrassed and sorry for her. Then, one evening, he’d gone out with John Riley who was in his outfit, and after dinner they’d gone on to the Astor (he realized afterwards because John knew a girl he was interested in was going to be there) and, sure enough, John located his lady and got her to dance with him. He’d watched them for a bit, and then just as he was thinking of going, he’d noticed that shit Joe Bronstein dancing with a tall thin girl in a green silk dress and a long page-boy bob. As they came round the floor nearer his table he could see that Joe was bawling her out and she was enduring it. He’d been in the same ship as Joe coming over and had disliked him as a bully who went for anyone weaker than himself. When they were about two yards away he saw that Joe was drunk, that the girl was precariously managing to keep him on his feet. For a second, she seemed to be looking at him, and her face, white, with a dark red mouth and eyes heavily fringed in black had all the mournful vulnerability of a clown … Then the music stopped and Joe, grasping her arm above the elbow, was lurching with her towards their table. Once there, he pushed her down onto her chair: he saw that she said something and rose to her feet, whereupon he seized her again and shoved her back so violently that she missed the chair and fell upon the floor. That was enough. He got up and went over to them. “Time you went home, Lieutenant,” he had said, but he hadn’t had to do much more, because the bouncers arrived and removed him. That was how he had met Angela. He had asked her whether she wanted a drink, and she had said, no, she just wanted to go home. Close to, she was younger than he had thought her. She started to thank him in her pretty, clipped English accent, but in the middle of it was overcome by an enormous yawn that she could hardly cover by her hand. She apologized and said she was rather tired. By then the cab he’d ordered had come. When she realized he was coming with her, she had shrunk into her corner and given her address in a voice that attempted distance, but sounded afraid. He would just see her safely home, he said, and she apologized again for being tired. (By the time they reached her flat, she had apologized four times.)

  The next day he had sent her some roses with a card saying he hoped she’d had a good sleep and would she call him? He’d been faintly surprised that she had. He’d taken her out on New Year’s Eve, and they’d drunk a lot, ending in a night club where her gin had been the worst hooch and she’d passed out.

  Making love to her the first time had been disappointing: there was something both practised and impersonal about her that he found sad, and he sensed damage way beyond Joe Bronstein. She made love like someone who always had to catch the eight-ten in the morning and knew that they would be standing for the whole journey. But for the rest of the time, when he took her around, exploring London which she seemed to know as little as he, going for trips to the country when he could get something to drive, to the movies when the weather was bad, when they spent evenings in his flat eating tins of turkey breast or steak that he could get from the PX and he taught her to play chess, she blossomed. He kept himself very steady and patient and always gentle: he did not want her to confuse gratitude with love. He guessed she’d been in love with a man who’d been killed, but she did not tell him and he did not ask.

  He caught the last train back to Oxford and she was waiting for him on the platform when he arrived, as he’d known she would be. It was bitterly cold, the train was late, and he limped along the platform stumbling nearly into her arms. They kissed: her face was freezing and she smelled of peppermint. Inside the battered little MG her family had given her years ago for her twenty-first birthday, they kissed more seriously.

  “Oh, Raymond! I’ve missed you so!”

  He had only been away for twenty-four hours.

  “I came back as quickly as I could.”

  “Oh, I know! I wasn’t blaming you!”

  It was perishingly cold in the car; their breath was steaming up the windows.

  “Let’s get going, darling.”

  “Yes, of course. You must be frozen.” She wiped the windscreen with her rather hairy scarf. She loved the way he said darling.

  “Did it all go well?” she asked in as light and unconcerned a voice as she could manage. She was dying to hear every detail of the wedding; not that she was jealous or anything so idiotic, it was simply that she was interested in everything about him.

  “Very well, I think.”

  “Did the bride wear white?”

  �
�Oh, yes. It was all properly done. Bridesmaids, you know, in church and all that.”

  “It must have been lovely.” I shall have to forgo all that, she thought. She had so often imagined herself walking slowly down the aisle, her radiance partly concealed by yards and yards of old lace like the end of all her favourite films. But now, when the war was over, and Raymond was able to leave the quite awful woman he was married to, it would have to be a registry office. However, what did a little petty detail like that matter compared to their wonderful, unique relationship?

  “It must have been rather agonizing for you, though,” she said. This was much later, after they had parked the car outside the huge dark red-brick Edwardian house in which they both had rooms. To begin with they had been with all the others, in Keble College, but after four people had broken into her room and tried to go to bed with her, Raymond had wonderfully arranged for them to live out. A bus collected them every day and took them to Blenheim. It was widely assumed by their colleagues that they were sleeping together; this, however, was not the case. They lived in a state of virtuous, romantic tension that made her admire Raymond more than ever, since she found it so intolerable. They had come very near consummation, but the value he placed upon her virginity seemed insurmountable. She would have liked him to be just as honourable, but at the same time overcome with desire. Then he could have regrets, make abject apologies, and she would be tender and magnanimous—she had rehearsed every detail of that scene without still, unhappily, having been called upon to perform it.

  “I mean—the whole situation,” she went on. They were in her room and she was making cocoa as Raymond’s ration of whisky from the local pub had run out. She had lit the small gas fire, but they both still wore their overcoats. “I suppose you had to pretend to everybody.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well—” She floundered. “I mean, that it was just a perfectly normal situation.” She imagined him standing beside his wife, smiling glassily and shaking hands with the guests.

  “Oh, that. Yes.” He suddenly remembered watching the best man lean over to put the ring on Nora’s hand since the bridegroom was not able to do it—a poignant moment that had somehow brought Nora’s future state home to him as nothing else had. In spite of himself, his eyes filled with tears. “It was,” he said huskily.

  “Oh, my darling!” She flung herself down on her knees before his chair. “I didn’t mean to upset you! Let’s talk about something else!”

  “You know Meccano?” Neville said in the train going back to Home Place.

  “Of course I do, stupid. I’ve never cared for it myself.”

  “Well, if you made long bits, they could be attached to the top of his stumps—he did have them, I could see from his jacket, and they could have a little motor and you could make sort of hands, claws, anyway and then he would be able to pick things up. A bit like a crane,” he added: Lydia had never been any good at mechanics.

  “I think you’re horrible to talk about poor Richard like that.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” he returned. “I’m trying to think of things to help him, which is more than you have. Your mere sorrow isn’t the slightest use to him.”

  She was silenced, and he spent the rest of the journey deciding whether or not he would be an inventor.

  “… and Daddy is so pleased that we are going to be at Frensham. If it had been requisitioned, goodness knows what would have happened to it, and anyway he thinks our ideas for it are far better than the Government’s.”

  They were back in the hotel where he had spent the night, and Nora was to occupy the room that had been his parents’. The hotel had sent up flowers. Scarlet and pink carnations with gypsophila rioted in a cut-glass vase. There was also a plate of grapes, most of which they had eaten. Tomorrow they were to be driven to Frensham.

  “You’re tired,” she said, before he could. “I’ll settle you now.”

  Half an hour later, when that was done—his back rubbed with surgical spirit, his teeth cleaned, his pee collected in a bottle, his dope taken, his short-sleeved nightshirt on (much easier than pyjamas, she had rightly said when she bought it for him), his pillows, including his special one, comfortably arranged, she bent over and gave him a light kiss.

  “I’ll come in at three to turn you,” she said, “and I’ll leave my door open so you can call. I’ll always hear you.” When she had turned out the light and gone next door and he could hear her preparing to go to bed he was suddenly, overwhelmingly touched at the way she behaved exactly as though nothing new had happened.

  Tony waited until Richard left the reception with Nora in a limousine that he could lift Richard into. He watched with the rest of the crowd until the car turned a corner and was abruptly out of sight, then he went back to the hotel cloakroom, collected his duffel coat, left the hotel, and found a pub where he got extremely drunk.

  PART

  THREE

  The Family

  January, 1944

  The house seemed horribly empty without Polly and Clary. He noticed it from the moment that his alarm went off in the morning. He would lie in bed listening to the silence; no thumps or crashes from above, no laughing, no imprecations, no light steps running down the stairs. He got up quickly, putting on his old blue dressing gown—the one Sybil had given him the first Christmas after the war had begun—and his leather slippers. Even so, the cold was very noticeable. He had had an Ascot installed in the bathroom on the half landing above his bedroom because there was nobody in the house to keep the range stoked. The Ascot unwillingly let him have a small bath, but the water ran into it so slowly, that in winter it was warm rather than hot. He had to boil a kettle for shaving. By the time he had bathed, shaved and dressed, he could turn the lights off, undo the blackout and reveal the bleak grey day without. He would descend to the basement, stopping on the way to collect the half pint of milk that was delivered every other day, and the newspaper that always came. 2,300 TONS OF BOMBS DROPPED ON BERLIN was this morning’s headline. He tried to imagine 2,300 tons of bombs, but the mind boggled. When you thought of what one bomb could do … He ate breakfast at the kitchen table: it was handier, and he kept the gas grill on for warmth after he had made his toast. Toast and tea was what he had, with margarine whose foul taste was partly concealed by some of Mrs. Cripps’s jam, or failing that Marmite. In the old days, he and Sybil would have breakfasted in the dining room next door, eating things like melon and boiled eggs and sometimes—his absolute favourite—kippers. Sybil had always sat with her back to the french window onto the garden, and on sunny mornings small tendrils of her hair had glowed against the light. Memories of this kind were no longer quite so agonizing, but they were essential: he couldn’t get through the days without thinking about her, reminding her of some small private joke, remembering things she had said or thought or liked or worried about. Each time, he experienced a little surge of love for her that was momentarily untainted by the despair of loss. It kept him going, he said to himself. There did not seem to be very much else to do that. The business certainly used up the days, all right, but with the Old Man out of it—virtually, although he came up twice a week and sat in his office waiting for people to come and talk to him—and he and Edward at loggerheads about the new wharf in Southampton, it was hardly fun. It was Edward who had insisted upon buying it: the property was going very cheaply, it was true, but it still meant ploughing back not only the money they had got from War Damage but using every bit of spare capital they possessed as well. Edward had argued that after the war there would be a building boom, and that with more premises they would be in a much better position to house and process the hardwoods that had made their name, but it seemed to Hugh unlikely that they would have accrued the money to buy the huge amount of stock that would justify a second wharf. They had had a row about it—well, several rows—but the Old Man had taken Edward’s side and so the new wharf had been bought and was going ahead. And then there was this large and now empty house. He sup
posed it would be sensible to sell it, or at least close it down, but he had to live somewhere, and this had been his house with her. If only Poll had stayed! But it had been he who had insisted that she should not. Louise had asked them both to share her house. Clary had wanted to go; Poll had demurred. “I’ll stay with you, Dad,” she had said. But he had known at once that she had not wanted to, even though she had said again and again that she did. In the end, he had taken her out to dinner to tackle her about it on her own. He took her to his club because he felt it was a better place to talk, and a little bit because he was so proud of her and enjoyed introducing her to his acquaintances there. “My word!” they would say, “what a stunning daughter!” and things like that. She was stunning. Her hair was like Sybil’s had been when he had met her, a deep glossy coppery colour, the same white complexion, and short upper lip with the same flat, curving mouth that was as charming as Sybil’s, but her high forehead and her dark blue eyes were pure Cazalet, very much like Rachel’s who in turn was like the Duchy. That was curious, he thought: one would not have said that she had the Duchy’s eyes, rather her aunt’s, but one would certainly attribute Rachel’s eyes to her mother. But unlike her mother or her aunt, Polly had a way with clothes: she contrived to make glamour out of neatness. She had come out with him straight from work in a white jersey and a dark skirt with pleats in it. The jersey had a high rolled neck and she’d pushed the sleeves up to just below her elbows so that the wide silver bracelet he’d given her last Christmas was visible on her wrist. She looked as smart as paint. She had sat in a large leather chair opposite him sipping the Bristol Cream sherry that he’d got her and telling him about her and Clary going to be interviewed for joining the Wrens.

  “It was so funny, Dad, all the things they asked us—either we’d never done them, like School Certificate, or we couldn’t have, like produce references from our last job. When Clary said she was a writer, they simply didn’t count it. But there was an enormous queue and they said the Wrens were nearly full anyway. It was rather a relief, really. I didn’t want to have to go away from—everyone.”