The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  And there was nothing the girl would not do for her! As the weeks went by, the house, which she knew had been becoming quite squalid from neglect, was transformed. Curtains were taken down and washed or sent to the cleaners. Furniture was polished, paint was washed, kitchen cupboards were turned out, rugs were beaten in the back garden, even her clothes and the battered sheet music were carefully mended, and meals, which when she was alone had become minimal, a sandwich or opening a tin, had become civilized. Three evenings a week Thelma now cooked and stayed for supper after which they played violin and piano sonatas together and quite often Thelma stayed the night. She had early recognized that Thelma did not have the makings of a concert pianist, but she was turning into an excellent accompanist and continued to make steady, though unremarkable progress with the violin. With work at the ambulance station less pressing, Sid had returned to teaching two days a week in a large boarding school for girls in Surrey. This entailed being away for the night and it became routine for Thelma to stay in the house while she was away.

  Then, it had been last September, she and Rachel had a long-planned three days’ holiday on Exmoor and, on the Thursday before she was due to join Sid in London, Rachel had telephoned to say that the Brig had bronchitis and that she could not leave him. “The doctor says it could easily turn into pneumonia if he doesn’t stay in bed and do exactly what he is told, and I’m afraid I am the only person who can make him.”

  The shock, the disappointment at not having this break with Rachel that she had looked forward to for weeks was so great that for a moment she was speechless—unable to reply.

  “Darling, are you still there?”

  “It’s only three days! Surely there are enough people in the house to look after him for three days?”

  “You couldn’t be more disappointed than I am.”

  But even knowing that this was sincere, that Rachel would indeed be disappointed, did not then mollify her as so often she had managed to make it do in the past. She had wanted to rage and shout: “Oh, yes, I could! I can! You don’t know how disappointed I am—you simply do not know!” What she said was, “But we’ve booked the rooms and everything.”

  “Well, I must pay for that, of course.”

  There was a pause, and then she heard herself say, “Don’t bother.”

  “Darling! I can hear you’re angry, and I am so sorry. It just can’t be helped.”

  When she had put the earpiece back, she found she was crying. It seemed like the worst disappointment of her life. She found herself trying to equal it because it triggered off memories of when she had felt something of the sort: when Evie had taken her beloved rag doll and stuffed it into the kitchen range; when her mother had told her that, after all, there was not enough money for her to have the violin lessons she had been promised; when she had failed to get her first job teaching that had seemed certain; when she had saved and saved the money for a ticket to hear Hubermann and got mumps and Evie had gone instead … none of these things seemed to compare at all with what she felt now. She would never be first with Rachel. She would never be able to have her to herself. Even these pathetic, rationed little oases that she trudged towards for weeks could be turned, by Rachel, into mirages …

  The telephone rang. “Darling! I’ve been talking to the Duchy. She says why don’t you come down here for the three days?”

  This offer seemed to illuminate, as nothing else had ever done, the hopeless gap between them: the years of longing and despair and keeping things comfortable for Rachel collected themselves into one implacable mass in her gorge; she felt sick.

  “I think I’ll go anyway, I really need the fresh air and exercise. Do thank the Duchy for her kind offer.” She felt sick with anger. “I might take Thelma with me,” she added.

  “Oh, that’s a good idea! It would be nicer for you to have company. I hope you have a lovely restful time, darling. Do ring as soon as you’re back.”

  So she had taken Thelma. She had gone on with the holiday chiefly to show Rachel that she wasn’t prepared to have her life disarranged all the time by Rachel’s parents and her conception of her duty towards them. And yet once, she thought now, I would have been so grateful for the Duchy’s invitation, I would have crept down there thankful for even a few minutes of Rachel’s company when she could be spared. And once, I should not have dreamed of going on with a plan that had been made for her and me by myself. Once, I should have been desperately sad, but I shouldn’t have been angry. And I certainly would not have considered for a moment taking a girl more than twenty years younger than myself on a holiday. Especially knowing that she was in love with me. For it was on the holiday that Thelma declared her love in such a way that Sid could no longer pretend to herself that it did not exist. She had been writing it off as what the girls at the school called a “pash,” or as gratitude for help and support from one for whom these things had been in palpably short supply. But, sitting in the heather on that balmy September day, the step was taken. She had been starved for so long that it seemed miraculous to be wanted so much by someone so young, whose innocence was only matched by her passion.

  For those three days it all seemed very simple: they were given sandwiches by the guest house, where they were the only occupants, and armed with a map they walked all the morning, found some private spot where they were concealed by rocks and heather from any footpath and when they had eaten, lay together on the springy turf. They were never disturbed. In the evenings after a substantial early supper—the guest house owners also had a farm and there were delicacies, eggs and chickens and home-cured bacon and blackberry pies—they would play bezique and Sid taught Thelma chess, at which she was unexpectedly good. They retired early, and Sid would lie in bed waiting for Thelma who would slip into the room in her dressing gown underneath which she wore nothing. For those three days it was easy for her to take everything that was offered so eagerly, to give Thelma all the attention she craved and to enjoy this wonderfully young, smooth white body abandoned to her. It was balm, too, to be told how much she was loved, to be with someone who thought that everything she said and did had so much merit. “I just adore you,” Thelma would whisper as she lay in Sid’s arms. “I’m so happy—just to be alone with you is perfect.” It was easy at the beginning to confuse desire with love. To begin with, she did not even recognize this, felt simply happy that all her bitterness about Rachel had somehow melted, that she could see her as pitifully trapped by the duties expected of an unmarried daughter by parents who clung to Victorian ethics. She knew that Rachel must have been desperately disappointed, that she, too, looked forward to the rare breaks that circumstances would occasionally allow her to have with the person “she would rather be with than anyone in the world.” “You couldn’t be more disappointed than I am,” Sid now remembered. This was on the last morning of the holiday with Thelma: they were to catch the afternoon train and Thelma wanted to repeat the walk they had done together on the first morning. Sid pointed out that there could not be time: it had taken them nearly three hours to get there, and they had no chance of getting back to catch the two thirty-eight train. Thelma had interpreted this as Sid not wanting to go to the place. There had been a small, fruitless argument that did not resolve anything. “Why do you want to go back there so particularly?” Sid had asked.

  Thelma, who had been staring out of the window, suddenly turned from it. “Because—that was where I found out that you loved me!” she said. “Where you said you loved me.” She began to blush, but the intense myopic eyes were fixed on Sid’s face.

  Sid opened her mouth to say she had never said that she loved her—and didn’t, couldn’t say anything. It was true, but it would be bitterly unkind to say so. That was the first jolt of reality.

  “I’m truly sorry that there isn’t time to go there,” was what she did say.

  In the train going back, with Thelma asleep opposite her in an otherwise empty carriage, she began to experience the first stirrings of anxiety—and guilt. She di
d not love Thelma: it was Rachel that she loved. She had been appallingly irresponsible towards someone far younger and vulnerable. The relationship could not possibly continue in this way. Somehow she must explain to the girl that she had succumbed to a madness that was wrong for both of them. They could continue as friends, go back to the situation that obtained before the holiday, but there could be no more going to bed. In the train, with Thelma asleep, this had seemed a perfectly possible solution. She had been unfaithful to Rachel, and that she would have to live with: she would, of course, continue to look after Thelma, teach her, play with her, take her to concerts, but she would not allow her to entertain any further thoughts of an affair between them …

  Now, a year later, and struggling with the dilemma of either missing a few days with Rachel, or letting Thelma down, she wondered how on earth she could have been so naïve. Plans that involved other people were far from simple; they only seemed to be so when one was by oneself making them, but the moment the other protagonists appeared on the scene the simplest intentions became corrupted by conflict. She had not at all succeeded in regulating her relationship with Thelma, although she had certainly tried. But Thelma displayed a kind of rubbery resistance to accepting anything that she said or, rather, she fell in with any arrangement that Sid made and then seemed to turn it to her own account. Thus when Sid said her piece about ending the affair, beginning with the not entirely honest reason that going on with it would be bad for Thelma, the girl accepted the situation with a burst of tears, but then later came back to Sid saying that she did not care what became of her provided that they could continue together. When Sid, in great trepidation, attempted to explain that she did not really love her and could not live with the inequality of their affections, Thelma, with another burst of tears, agreed that this would be wrong. But then she returned with what she described as her second thoughts (her deadly second thoughts!), and said that (a) she did not mind whether Sid loved her as much as she loved Sid, and (b) that she thought Sid must love her more than she, Sid, realized to care so much about her feelings. She would do exactly whatever Sid wanted, she repeatedly said, as the situation continued with an uneasy compromise, or rather to be more or less what Thelma wanted, Sid now thought. She came and stayed for one night a week, when sometimes they went to bed. She continued to clean the house, to minister to every domestic need, to practise, to be given lessons and to play sonatas with Sid. Once, Sid had tried to get rid of her, had said that the whole thing should come completely to an end. That had been when Thelma had asked if she loved anyone else, “your friend Rachel Cazalet, for instance?” and Sid had lied. She had an instinct that to tell Thelma anything about that would be very dangerous indeed, but the lie further weakened her position. She kept them apart, although she sensed that Thelma’s curiosity about Rachel was intense. This meant that Rachel coming to stay was a hazard: she could not absolutely rely upon Thelma keeping out of the way any more since she had turned up once when Rachel was there and, by the greatest good fortune, Sid had seen her coming in at the front garden gate. It was morning, and Rachel was having a bath. She had sped downstairs and met Thelma at the front door.

  “I wouldn’t have come since you told me not to, but I left my purse with all my money in it on the kitchen shelf. I’ll just pop down and get it.” Then, sensing Sid’s displeasure, she added, “I honestly wouldn’t have bothered you, only I simply can’t manage for a whole three days without any money at all.”

  After she had gone, it crossed Sid’s mind that Thelma had left her purse behind on purpose—an ignoble thought, but not unlikely.

  No—there had not been, and still seemed not to be, any easy solution. The situation, rather, seemed to have developed a life of its own, and the only way in which she could put a stop to its insinuation would be to tell Thelma simply to go away and never come back. What stopped her from doing this? Because every time the thought of it crossed her mind all kinds of objections rushed in upon her, and while she might have been able to deal with one of them, together they made an insuperable barrier. That it was her fault the whole thing had started in the first place was one: she had only to have stood out against Thelma’s attractions, have kept her faith with Rachel, for the whole thing to have been far more manageable; a pupil with a crush, something she had dealt with successfully before. Then she could not help putting herself in Thelma’s place. She understood what it felt like to be single-mindedly in love: she knew, better than most, the agonizing frustration of it being unrequited. On top of that, she knew that in some awful way her vanity was engaged: it was both a consolation and a reassurance to be so cared for and wanted. Years with her sister Evie had effectively driven away any people who might have become friends; before Thelma’s appearance, she had been used to a life that was essentially solitary except for her work; now she had become softened up—the thought of coming back to a house that was empty night after night, of losing the inestimable pleasure of making music with somebody with whom one could talk about anything from Schumann to the minutiae of daily life was bleak … It was a new and seductive experience to be cared for in the way that Thelma took care to care.

  None the less, she thought now, she would be ruthless: she would not take Thelma to Stratford; she would go with Rachel, and she would simply say that Rachel needed a break. She would be firm about it: she would not change her mind when Thelma, as she knew would happen, erupted in tears. If she allowed Thelma to interfere with her precious time with Rachel, there would only be one course open to her: Thelma would have to go. The prospect of even this much truth in what she uncomfortably knew to be essentially a dishonest situation was both anxious and heartening. She decided to ring Rachel and tell her that she had fixed it with Thelma, and then deal with the latter that evening, and immediately thought, Oh God—that’s another lie. I won’t have fixed it with Thelma. Deceit, she thought, was becoming second nature to her.

  Archie arrived, as he had been asked, at half past seven, which was pretty good considering how chancy Sunday buses could be. The walk from the 53 bus stop in Abbey Road had tired him—his leg had long since ceased to get any better. He negotiated the rickety wooden gate and limped up the path that was edged with ancient iris plant. The front door was the kind that had glass to the waist and, although it was frosted and therefore nothing inside was visible, the house was full of sound. A piano being played—extremely well, probably a gramophone record, he thought—a baby crying, the sound of bath water running out down the large iron stack pipe beside the front door, voices, somebody laughing—there was so much sound that he wasn’t sure whether the bell he had pressed had rung. There was a knocker, so he used it.

  “Archie! Oh, good!” It was Clary. “You are punctual,” she added, as though he shouldn’t have been. She gave him her usual perfunctory hug.

  “Who is playing the piano?”

  “Peter Rose. Louise’s friend Stella’s brother.”

  At the far end of the hall, Louise was sitting on the stairs. She wore a rather fetching housecoat of some striped material. Her hair streamed down her back and her feet were bare. She greeted him by blowing a kiss.

  “You look like the heroine in an opera,” he said.

  “I’m sitting here to listen to Peter,” she explained. “If we go in, he’ll stop.”

  A girl appeared at the head of the basement stairs. “Where’s the tin opener?”

  “Haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Oh!” Clary said. “I used it to prop open the lavatory window.”

  “What, this one?” The girl indicated the door opposite her.

  “No, upstairs. And Poll’s having a bath.”

  “Well, you can interrupt her, Clary. You’ll have to if you want any dinner.”

  Louise said, “Is Piers helping you?”

  “Well, he’s with me. Not exactly helping. I think he’s the last person I’d have on a desert island.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m wonderful at conversation, and you’d be surprised how
quickly you’d feel short of that.” He had loomed up behind Stella on the stairs.

  “This is Archie,” Clary said. “Piers. And Stella.”

  Piers gave him a tired smile. “I warn you there’s nothing to eat in this house except cork mats,” he said.

  Clary had stumped upstairs in search of the tin opener. Archie looked round for a chair. His leg ached. Louise patted the stairs beside her. “Come and sit here, Archie.”

  “No. I’d never get up from there. I’d become a fixture. When you sold the house I’d go with it.”