“Your baby is crying,” Piers remarked, leaning over the banisters and stroking Louise’s hair.
“He’s teething, Mary says. But I’d better go and see what she is doing with him.”
“Maternal love. Isn’t it amazing? If I had to choose what was my bottom thing in this house I’d find it quite difficult to decide between Sebastian and that frightful soapstone of monkeys.”
“It belonged to Louise’s grandmother,” Stella said.
Archie had found a chair with about six coats on it. He put them on the floor and sat down. The piano had stopped.
Clary reappeared with the tin opener and gave it to Stella, who said, “Is there really only one tin of corned beef?”
“I think so, because we used the other one for sandwiches for Hampstead Heath. We had a picnic yesterday,” she said to Archie, “and we went to the Vale of Health. It’s like a dear little village you suddenly come upon. Piers knows a painter who lives there, but he was out.”
“It was lovely all the same,” Piers said. “We sang the whole way. Sort of Handel recitative making extremely personal remarks about other walkers.”
“We sang some jolly choruses as well. Nobody realized it was about them, though,” Clary said.
“Did you want them to?” Archie asked.
“Well, it would have been fun if they’d looked a bit amazed, shocked, you know.”
Louise reappeared with her baby on her shoulder. “Mary wants to eat her supper, so said I’d have him for a while.”
“Let’s go and sit in the sitting room,” Piers said. “Stairs are not conversational for more than two.”
“Who’s going to finish cooking supper?” Clary demanded. “It really ought to be you, Louise, you’re far the best at it.”
“I’m no better than Stella—we learned just the same things. And, anyway, I’ve got Sebastian. I peeled all the potatoes.”
“All right,” Stella said. “Clary and I will do the rest. Just remind me of what we’re aiming at.”
“You fry the onions, mash the potatoes, and then you mash in the corned beef.”
“Will one tin do for seven of us? It seems a bit mean.”
“I brought a tin of peaches,” Piers said. “All the way from sunny Bletchley.”
“I daresay you did. But they won’t be any good in a corned beef hash. They’ll have to be pudding.”
“Polly’s made her Carnation Milk pudding.”
“God! That sounds revolting.”
“It isn’t at all. It’s a kind of whip. You’d never know it was tinned milk.”
The sitting room was empty except for a young man sitting at the piano. He got to his feet as they came in, and Archie saw that he was wearing an RAF uniform.
“Leading Aircraftsman Rose,” Louise said. “This is Archie Lestrange, and you know Piers, of course.”
The baby, who had been staring at Archie in an intense impassive manner that he was beginning to find disconcerting, suddenly convulsed himself and began to cry.
“Give him to me,” Peter said, and held out his arms; his rather heavy and haggard face was transformed by a tender smile. He carried the baby back to the piano, wedged him between his arms and began to play “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Sebastian stopped crying.
“Do play the variations, Peter,” Louise called from the other end of the room.
Archie sat down on the hard little sofa and wondered whether he was going to be offered a drink. Clary had retreated to the kitchen with Stella, and Piers was leading Louise out of the french windows and down the steps into the garden.
Then Polly appeared, her coppery hair newly washed and shining. She wore her dark pleated skirt and over it a loose jersey of gentian blue that made her eyes look the same colour. “Sorry to be so long. I had to wait until Sebastian had had his bath and then the water wasn’t hot for a bit. Nobody has given you a drink; I’ll go and see what there is and tell you.”
She went through double doors that led to the dining room. “There’s a bit of gin, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to put in it.”
“Water would be fine.”
She came back with a tooth glass and the gin bottle. “You help yourself and I’ll get some water.” When she had done that, she sat neatly on the floor a few yards away from him.
“Am I the only person having a drink?”
“Tonight you are. We don’t awfully mind about it and the bottle got used up two nights ago when Louise had a party. We only get one bottle a month from the shop, you see.” She gave him one of her quick little social smiles and then stared at her hands that were clasped round her knees.
“How’s the art school?” he asked.
“Oh! The art school. Fine. Very interesting. The most surprising people seem prepared to be models. For life classes. I’m no good at drawing, of course.”
“It’s a bit early to know that, isn’t it?”
“It may be,” she answered politely.
The music had stopped as the baby had begun to cry again. Peter got up from the piano and walked about with him in his arms. “He doesn’t really care for Mozart,” he said, “he prefers the theme.”
“He’s teething,” Louise said as she came up the steps from the garden. Piers was holding her hand. “I’ll take him up to Mary.”
It was a long time before they had their supper, which was eaten in the basement in the kitchen, and by the time they had had it Peter said he had got to start getting back to Uxbridge, and Archie, who had decided upon a cab for going back to his flat, offered to give him a lift to his station. He’d been on forty-eight hours’ leave, he said, and Louise always let him stay whenever he wanted, but he only went when Stella got time off as his parents liked him to go home. “We don’t tell them about these times,” he said, “but you don’t know them, do you, so it’s all right. They’d kick up no end if they knew.”
“I wouldn’t tell them, anyway.”
His white, rather haggard face softened, as it had when he had been dealing with Sebastian. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you would,” he said. “It’s just that it would be awful if they knew.” He had dark marks under his eyes, like bruises, and his uniform looked like fancy dress.
“Louise is wonderful,” he said after a silence. “She’s made the place so friendly and easy. And she lets me practise as much as I like when I go there.”
“You’re in the RAF orchestra, aren’t you?”
“I know it sounds marvellously lucky, but it has its drawbacks. They don’t think you need to practise at all, you see. I’m always travelling about, arriving somewhere and playing something I haven’t worked up with practically no rehearsal on a usually quite awful piano that I won’t have had a chance to touch before the concert.
“I suppose in a war one really has to choose between being frightened or being bored.”
“Which are you?” said Archie.
“Well, after a spell of being frightened, I’ve been relegated to being bored.”
After he had dropped Peter at Uxbridge, he thought about these alternatives: his job, certainly, was largely boredom. The hours and days and weeks he must by now have spent at staff meetings, in reading hundreds of Action Reports, and the endless flow of memos that were dumped in his in-tray every few minutes of every day in his office. He was really a kind of glorified clerk—condensing information for his superiors, making innumerable very small decisions about the selection of material that needed referral to the right department, sometimes trying to persuade people with bees in their bonnets to take them out. Since the window in his office had been blown out, they had made it very much smaller but it had also ceased to open—he felt he had been breathing the same air now for years. Still, he was lucky really—to be alive, to have something to do that was presumably useful in some sort. He did not have the kind of anxiety that Louise must live with: that her husband might be killed. He had not had to spend his extreme youth as the other girls were doing: Polly had a typing job in the Ministry of Information, a
nd Clary, most surprisingly, was being a secretary for a very young bishop; “He hasn’t asked me whether I believe in God, so I just don’t say anything on the subject,” she told him. But clearly, in that house, they were having some fun. They had a much played gramophone and the piano and they went to the cinema and on expeditions like the one to Hampstead Heath. In spite of funny food—and there hadn’t been much of it—and no drink, they had a lot of silly jokes, and Louise gave parties. “Who comes to them?” he had asked. “Oh, we pick people up in the underground sometimes and Michael’s friends from the Navy come when they are on leave and they bring friends—lots of people,” Clary had replied airily. They had had a cook to begin with, a Mrs. Weatherby found by Villy in Sussex, but she had not been able to cope with the hours they kept, or the untidiness and noise, and had soon left. “It’s much more fun without her and, anyway, we needed her bed for people who come to stay.” On the whole, he thought, it was a good thing that the girls had gone to live with Louise, partly because it was time they had more independence, and partly because he had begun to sense that they were not any longer so close to one another as they had been. This had come up before: it no longer seemed to be the thing to invite both of them together for supper or a film. Clary had been quite open about it. “I’d much rather go out with just you,” she had said. “Anyway, Poll has dozens of people in love with her—she could go out every night if she wanted to. Another drawback of working for the Bish. He’s married and I can’t see him taking me to anything except a Church fête.”
“Are you jealous of Polly?” he had asked her one evening.
“Me? Jealous? Good Lord, no. I couldn’t stand the sort of dreary people she has mooning after her. Frightfully old men in suits—far older than you,” she added hastily, “who work in the same building as she does, and quite a lot of Louise’s husband’s friends—they all fall for her. It’s her appearance—people stare at her in the Underground, and once, at the Arts Theatre when we went out with Louise and Michael when he was on leave, a man actually sent a note to our table to her. He can’t have known at all what she is like, can he? Just across a room. Any more,” she said after thinking about it, “than people could tell what I was like across a room. Or you, Archie.” She had looked at him challengingly when she said this, but he decided not to disagree. But after that he took to inviting them separately, although he noticed that whenever he went down to Home Place for the weekend they both came too. On these occasions, Clary became rather noisily proprietary, and Polly withdrew. However, there was so much else going on there that neither of the girls could monopolize him. He had become one of the family, and was treated to all the small complaining confidences that might be expected from that. Villy did not approve of the frequency with which Zoë went to London—to see an old school friend who had just moved back there; it was hard on Ellen, she said, who was getting on and finding Wills a handful. Poor Rachel was pulled this way and that between the demands of her old aunt Dolly and the Brig, the one with no memory and the other with no sight, neither of them able to understand why she could not spend all of every day with them to the exclusion of the other. Lydia complained at not being sent to a proper school like Neville, of being treated like a child: “I am thirteen, after all, and they don’t seem to realize that when they send me off to bed I’ve got nobody to go with. My foul cousin Judy who goes to a proper school is learning dancing and art and things and she goes on and on about team spirit and I don’t even know what it is! You might point some of this out to them, Archie, because they listen to you. I don’t want to go to the same school as Judy but any other old school would do.”
Once, when he had finished playing a rather acrimonious game of Pelman patience with all of the girls, Lydia had suddenly asked: “After the war, Archie, will you be going back to your house in France to live?”
“I don’t know. I expect I might.”
“Because if you are, I thought of coming with you. Only I’d quite like to know if you are, because I won’t bother with French if you aren’t. So far, it is being a fearfully dull language where I can only say the sort of thing people put on postcards.”
The other two came down on her like a load of bricks.
“Really, Lydia, you are the limit! You can’t just propose yourself like that!” Clary said.
“He might not want anybody, but he certainly wouldn’t want a child!” Polly said.
“And if he did, it would be up to him to say, not you,” Clary said.
“And, anyway, he might not be going back to France at all,” Polly said.
“He certainly wouldn’t want someone as much younger than he is as you, anyway,” Clary said.
“Shut up snubbing me! How old are you, Archie? We know you so well, I think I ought to know that.”
“I shall be thirty-nine this year.”
“That makes you twenty-six years younger, so you can see it is out of the question.”
“What is? I wasn’t considering marrying him! I just want to be an adventuress—like in Bulldog Drummond. I’d just live with him and he’d buy me frocks and strange exotic perfumes and I’d arrange parties.”
“Oh, do stop talking about me as though I wasn’t here!” Archie said with an exaggerated dismay that he hoped would lighten the situation. It didn’t.
“He wouldn’t want anyone so naturally rude and tactless,” Clary retorted. “But if you do want someone, you know, to talk to in the evenings, I could always come and stay with you.”
There was a pause. “And what about you, Poll?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “I really haven’t the faintest idea. The war’s not even over. I think it’s silly to talk about—anything—till it is.”
“Mr. Churchill said the hour of greatest effort is approaching,” Clary said. “It might be nearly over.”
“Only in Europe,” Polly said. “There’s still the Japanese.”
Her face had become so pale, that Archie knew she had been blushing. She saw him, and began picking up the cards from the floor.
Then Clary put an arm round her and said, “It’s all right, Poll. The Japanese will never invade here.”
But Polly merely answered in a thin unfriendly voice, “I know that. Of course I know that.” And Archie saw how Clary felt rebuffed, and suddenly wanted to put his arms round her.
That night when he lay in bed waiting for sleep, the house in France came vividly back to him. He had left one morning in such a hurry (he’d been offered a lift north in a lorry by a friend of the café owner who was taking a load of peaches to Paris, and some instinct had warned him to take the chance when it was offered), but it had left him no time to do anything but pack one bag of clothes; he’d even left his bed unmade, pots and pans in the sink and paintbrushes uncleaned—they might still be stuck, stiff and useless in the jam-jar with the turps long gone … He’d taken one final look at the kitchen, with its deeply recessed windows that looked out onto olives and apricot orchards and down onto the vine-covered veranda of the café below. The geraniums and basil that he had left on the window sill would have died quickly from lack of water. He had even left the book he had been reading—a huge American novel, what had it been called? Anthony Adverse—or, rather, that he had been struggling through, open on the pearwood table into which some long past wicked—child, probably, had cut initials. He’d walked through the wider door he’d made, which connected the kitchen with the larger room where he worked. It faced north over the valley, bathed at that moment in hot golden light. It wasn’t really a house: he had two small bedrooms and a shower he had installed on the floor above, and then a steep staircase that led to the door that opened out onto the village street. But this separate entrance had made it seem like a house, and he liked the sounds and smells from the café where he often ate. It made him feel less solitary and, after ten years or so, he had become accepted as a reasonable foreigner. He’d left his key in the café, and perhaps the old woman who cleaned his place would have
taken the plants although she would not have touched his brushes. It was odd. He missed the place—realized that he had a great longing for it, but at the same time so far as being solitary was concerned, he felt softened up. It would be an ordeal, of a different kind from what it had originally been when he first went there. Then, he had gone to try to forget Rachel; it had only been she whom he had wanted; if he could not have her, then he was able to endure without anyone. Now he would be going back with nothing to renounce, but he would be leaving this family who had taken him in and who had become a part of his life. This summer—the invasion was certain—it would be the beginning of the end of the war. And with France liberated, Rupert’s fate would be certain. It was still possible, though very unlikely, that he was alive, but if he was not, then he would have to see to Clary. He might take her to France with him to help her through her loss, as years ago he had helped Rupert when Clary’s mother had died. There was a kind of symmetry to that. It was the least he could do for Rupert, he thought defensively; he found himself smiling in the dark.
Clary
May–June, 1944
This is a weekend, and I’m not going home because I’ve just become an air-raid warden and I have to go to lectures which they tend to have at weekends so that people who are working can go to them. We haven’t had any bombs lately, but everybody seems to think that we will—especially when the invasion starts which might be any day now. Louise has gone away to Hatton as Michael has leave and he doesn’t much like spending it in London. She has taken the baby and Mary with her, but Mary is leaving soon to get married. We all earnestly hope that Louise will get another nanny because when Mary had a holiday the house got into a frightful mess and she never stopped washing nappies and sterilizing bottles and Sebastian cried an awful lot. He was cutting teeth and his face had sort of tomato-coloured blotches. Otherwise he looks rather like Mr. Churchill who is reputed to have said that all babies look like him, so you can see that my simile was not original. Anyway, this is Saturday morning, and the house is very quiet because Polly is still asleep. She has taken to sleeping later and later at weekends. So I’m sitting on the steps that go down to the back garden drinking rather cold brown tea and writing my journal to you. The trouble is, Dad, that by the time you get back there will be so much of it, it will take you years to read and you’ll probably get bored which I wouldn’t blame you for although it would hurt my feelings. I haven’t told you about my job—my first job. It is a bit of an anti-climax actually: I work for a bishop called Peter. He’s supposed to be young for a bishop, but that isn’t awfully young. He has a rather bunnish wife—I suppose I mean dumpy (but she also has a bun) and she is always smiling but without much enjoyment. They live in a large dark house filled with bits of furniture that they don’t seem to use, and the whole place smells of very old meals and clothes. People are always coming and Mrs. Bish makes tea for them, sometimes with biscuits, often not. Then the trays get left on tables until I clear them up, because she’s run out of teapots. The garden is full of thistles and loosestrife and very ragged evergreens. They don’t have time for the garden, they say. I work at one end of the dining-room table—well, it’s where I do the letter typing, but I take down the letters in the Bish’s study. I sit on a hard armchair that looks as though it is upholstered in moss and he wanders about the room making rather awful jokes that I keep putting into the letters by mistake. His favourite jokes are Spoonerisms, you know, like “Excuse me, Captain, your slip is showing” or “Hush my brat.”
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