The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  They have two children called Leonard and Veronica, but I haven’t met them as they are always away. Anyway, I go in the morning to be there at half past nine and usually I go out to lunch at a local café and have chips and a fried egg or rather awful sausages that taste as though they are made from some animal that died in the zoo and then I go back and work until five and then I bicycle home. I have to answer the telephone as well, but that is in the hall, nowhere near my typewriter. Still, it is a job and I get two pounds a week. Everybody the Bish knows is described by him as a saint or splendid or a bit mad but enormously interesting, but when they come to the house they don’t seem to be any of these things. So I am not learning much about human nature which is a pity.

  This house is odd, largely I think because it doesn’t feel as though it belongs to anybody. It still had quite a lot of Lady Rydal’s furniture and things in it, and then Louise has added her wedding presents, and then we—Polly and I—have brought a few of our things. At weekends, when people come to stay, they have to sleep in beds in the dining room, because there are only five bedrooms and Louise and the baby and Nanny take up two of them. Poll and I have a little attic room each on the top floor.

  Marriage doesn’t seem to have changed Louise much. But in a way, of course, she doesn’t lead a very married life, with Michael nearly always away. Quite a lot of people who come are a bit in love with her and I think she enjoys that.

  Poll worries me rather. She has become quite difficult to talk to. I know she finds her job awfully dull, but I don’t think that is the whole problem. She feel guilty about having left Uncle Hugh alone in his house, but that isn’t the whole thing either. I suspect her of being in love, but she gets furious if one approaches the subject, which I have done six or seven times with enormous tact. She goes to an art school two evenings a week, and I think it may be someone she has met there. Her not telling me probably means he is married and the whole thing is doomed. But she always used to discuss everything, and not doing so is making her much crosser than it makes me—the front door bell’s rung, one of Louise’s devoted admirers I expect, but I’ll have to go and answer it.

  This is days later because it wasn’t one of Louise’s men, it was Neville! He was wearing his school uniform (I told you, Dad, he’d left his prep school because he got too old and they sent him to Tonbridge). I knew he absolutely loathed it there, so although he said he’d come to breakfast, I knew he’d run away. He had a small suitcase with him which I knew wasn’t his but I thought the best thing was to give him breakfast (he’s got rather scraggy and always looks as though he’s starving, even after a meal these days) so I didn’t make any remark about the suitcase. He followed me down to the kitchen and I made him toast and he had marge and Bovril on that and then he ate the remains of the macaroni cheese Poll and I had had for supper the night before and some stewed apple and then he noticed a tin of pilchards that I didn’t even know we had and wanted that. All the time he ate, he talked about Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers’ films. But eventually, even he had run out of things to say about them and he just sat drinking tea. Then he said, “Did you know, one can’t get to Ireland any more? There’s a ban. Idiotic. I didn’t know till I got to London.” I remembered that once before, when he’d run away, he’d said he was going to live in Ireland, so now I was sure he’d done it again. I told him he’d run away, and he said, yes.

  “I really do definitely, absolutely inevitably loathe it,” he said. “It’s quite idiotic to go on being somewhere you hate so much.” Then he looked at me in a surprisingly charming way and said, “You’ve been miserable in your life, so I thought you’d understand. That’s why I came here.”

  But if you’d been able to get to Ireland, I thought, you would have just gone. He was turning on the charm, and actually, Dad, in an awful way, he can be frightfully charming. I said: “Supposing I just hadn’t been here. What would you have done then?”

  “Waited,” he said. “I’ve got some gobstoppers in my case, and some oats that a boy feeds his secret rat with at school. I took some of them.”

  “Of course you haven’t told them at home.”

  “Of course not. They’d only try to send me back. I came here because I assumed you’d be different. Or have you,” his eyes narrowed, but his voice was bland, “have you become one of Them?”

  It was a jolly difficult question to answer, I found. Because I couldn’t see what he could do if he didn’t go back. On the other hand it did seem quite wrong to betray him. In the end I said I didn’t know but I did promise not to do anything behind his back. “I shall keep my back permanently turned, then,” he said, but he looked relieved, and it was then I realized that his usual expression these days is wary—a bit as though he is being hunted.

  Then I thought of Archie. He would know what to do. To begin with, Neville didn’t want me to ring him but when I guaranteed that Archie’s behaviour would not be dastardly, he said all right.

  Archie came in a cab. While he was on his way, Neville kept thinking of stupid things he could do: drive a taxicab—he said Tonbridge had taught him to drive but, of course, he’s nothing like old enough—or be a keeper at the zoo—he knows quite a lot about snakes, but I really don’t think that would help him—or be a waiter in a restaurant, or a bus conductor, which he thought he’d quite like for a bit, all hopeless careers for a boy of—he says fourteen but he isn’t even that yet.

  When Archie arrived, he hugged me as usual and gave me a kiss, and then he did the same with Neville, and Neville sort of shied like a horse and then frowned and frowned and I could see he was quite upset—he was trying not to cry. Archie didn’t seem to notice and brought out a small parcel and said it was coffee and would I make some. While I was doing that Polly turned up in her dressing gown with her hair in curlers. She stopped in the doorway when she saw Archie and Neville, and said she’d just go and get dressed. I don’t think she wanted Archie to notice her too much in her curlers. But he said why didn’t she have her breakfast as he wanted to talk to Neville and they could do it upstairs. Neville said he didn’t want to be told things to do, and Archie said, “I don’t want to tell you, I want to hear you.” And that seemed to make it all right with Neville because they went upstairs.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”

  “I didn’t like to leave him. He’s run away.”

  “I didn’t mean Neville, I meant Archie.”

  “He’s only just arrived. I asked him because I don’t know what to do.” Then I told her how difficult I felt it was about what side to be on, and she was very understanding about that and said she would feel just the same. “I felt like that about Simon,” she said, “he seemed so alone.”

  “If you think he was alone, what do you think it’s like for Neville? He hasn’t got anybody—with Dad—gone—away—Zoë’s no earthly use as a parent and I don’t think he would count me.”

  When I’d made the coffee, she took a cup up with her to get dressed. I made a tray for Archie and Neville and took it up to the sitting room, but the door was closed. I had to put the tray down to open it and I heard Archie’s voice asking something quite quietly and silence, and then while I was picking up the tray again Neville suddenly burst out sobbing, the most awful sad sound I’ve ever heard him make. Archie saw me and motioned to leave the tray and shut the door which I did.

  They were hours up there. I went back to the kitchen and washed up, and then cleaned things that hadn’t been cleaned for ages because I felt so anxious and couldn’t think what to do. He must be dreadfully unhappy, I kept thinking, and I felt I hadn’t been at all a good sister to him—far too selfish and thinking about myself all the time, and not imagining what life was like for him at all. What I have found, Dad, is that those sort of ruminations are absolutely useless: saying to myself how badly I’ve done something only makes me feel awful and the actual thing simply feel harder than ever. I have to try and think what else I could have done, which sometimes means pretending I’
ve done something in the first place. In this case I haven’t cared enough about Neville—I haven’t really even loved him much. I used to secretly hate him because I blamed him for your wife [here she crossed out wife and put “first wife”] dying. She was my mother, after all, and it didn’t matter nearly as much to him because he never knew her. Then I suppose I got to tolerating him, and when you got left in France (and I have to tell you, Dad, that if I had been Pipette, I wouldn’t have left you; I have to say that I care more about a single person than this country as a whole—in this case you), I was so worried about you and missing you that I didn’t think what it was like for Neville. Because that left him with nobody—he didn’t have a boy his own age like I have Poll. So from now on I am planning to love him. As you’re not here I’ll do it until you come back at least. The only thing is that he is turning into a sort of eccentric and in my experience people only like them when they are dead, or at least at arm’s length. Eccentrics are people that other people like there to be—like giraffes and gorillas—but most people don’t want one in the home, as they say. “Our lovely home” we call this house, particularly when it gets into a really bad mess due to lack of housework and maids to do things. So, from now onwards, my policy towards Neville is going to change.

  Anyway, Archie was the tops. He rang up the school and said he would be coming back with Neville on Sunday evening and they seemed all right about that. They hadn’t even noticed that he’d gone, so they hadn’t rung up Home Place which was one good thing. He said he’d take us all out to lunch and then we could go to a film, but that after that he would take Neville back to his flat for the night. And he said that he told me that he didn’t think that Neville was at the right school for him at all, and that he would find a better one. We went to two Laurel and Hardy films and Neville laughed so much that people turned round in their seats to look at him, and then he did all his ITMA voices for Archie when we had tea in Lyons. He was quite funny—no, he was very funny: he reminded me of you, Dad, when you do people. Then he had to go and be sick, which was a bit of a pity because he’d had quite an expensive tea. I would have gone with him but I couldn’t because he had to go to the gents. But Archie went and when they came back Neville looked rather pale but quite cheerful and he had another tea including baked beans and some Battenberg cake—you know, that awful kind that is pink and cream-coloured squares. Then we said goodbye at Tottenham Court Road, and Polly and I caught a 53, and Neville and Archie went off to Archie’s flat. Archie said he’d ring me on Sunday evening which he did. He said Neville was being horribly bullied at school and that the last straw had been that the friend who he’d had at prep school, who had also gone to this school with him, had joined the gang of bullies. He said he’d told the school that he was taking Neville away at the end of this term, and apparently he knows someone who knows the headmaster of a terribly good school called Stowe that he thinks would be right for Neville, and he’s going to go and see them about it. Usually they don’t take people at such short notice, but Archie’s friend seemed to think that they might make an exception in the case of Neville. Archie is having lunch with Uncle Hugh about all this to get family agreement, but as everybody trusts him he’s sure to get it. I told Archie that I wanted to help and he said, write letters to him and have him to stay a bit in London in the holidays. What would we do without Archie, I ask myself. I asked Poll that, too, on the bus on the way home, and she said, “But you don’t have to, do you?” We were getting off the bus then and I dropped my purse, but afterwards I wondered why she said “you” in that way, but when I asked her she said she hadn’t. She had, but I didn’t want to have an argument with her.

  6th June. This morning the invasion started. Oh, Dad! I hope they reach you wherever you are and you will be liberated. Everyone is excited—even the Bish has the wireless on to hear the news bulletins. They have not got anywhere near where you were last known to be, Dad, but I bet they will. The landings are in Normandy but obviously that’s just a beginning. Louise is back, and Michael is in it and she is awfully worried. She went to a party on the night before it began and didn’t come back all night. She said the party was out of London which she hadn’t known and she missed getting a lift back and had to stay the night. That night Mr. Churchill said in Parliament that things were going well, but Archie told us that they are having rather bad weather. He said it must have been awful being in the assault ships, which are quite small, because they were in them for hours before they sailed and a lot of people must have been seasick. I can’t imagine anything worse than feeling seasick and then having to scramble ashore and fight. (Actually, I hadn’t imagined that, Archie imagined it for me.) Michael is in a frigate. We thought something must be happening the evening before, because planes kept on going over all night. Oh, Dad, wherever you are, I hope you know it’s happening, because it must cheer you up.

  For a long time after that, she didn’t write her journal. She couldn’t bear to because she had initially felt so certain that once the Allies set foot in France, he would be set free somehow. But nothing like that happened. There was still complete silence—no news of him at all. That summer, her heart began to fail her about him, and having to confront the idea that all these years he might not have been alive made writing to him that summer seem pointless and macabre. She told nobody, not even Polly, about any of this. Each morning she woke with hope which, throughout the day, ebbed away until, by evening, she was sickeningly sure that he would not come back. Alone at night, she practised getting used to the idea that he was dead and wept for him. And then in the morning she would wake and think that it was silly and wrong to think any such thing, and would imagine him suddenly turning up. Sometimes she longed to talk to someone, Poll, for instance, or Archie, but she was too much afraid that they would gently, kindly, confirm her worst fear, and, since she had gradually understood that she was the only person who believed he was still alive, to waver to anyone seemed a kind of betrayal.

  She lost her job that summer for the perfectly respectable reason that the Bishop’s wife’s cousin was widowed the first day of the invasion, they wanted her to come and live with them and the Bishop said that the secretarial job would give her something to do. She did not mind in the least. She kept her promise about writing to Neville.

  The V-1s started very soon after the invasion. The first time she saw one was when she and Polly were rather sulkily weeding the back garden. The warning had sounded and they heard anti-aircraft guns making the distant popping sounds like corks coming out of bottles. Then they saw what looked like a very small plane speeding overhead all by itself, which was unusual.

  “It’s on fire,” Polly said, and she could see the flame coming out of its tail. “It can’t be a bomber, it’s too small,” she said. There was something curiously unhuman about its undeviating course. It passed out of their sight, the noise of its engines becoming fainter and fainter until they could not hear it at all. But shortly after that there was the sound of an explosion. “It must have had at least one bomb,” Polly said.

  In the days that followed there were many more pilotless planes, doodlebugs they were called, and everybody became used to their small mechanical roar, and learned to dread the moment when the engine cut out, because that meant that they were about to crash with their cargo of explosive.

  Dear Neville [she wrote],

  I expect you’ve seen the V-1s coming over your school. As an air-raid warden I have to see to people going into shelters when the warning sounds which means counting them and, if there aren’t enough people, asking the ones who are there who they think is missing. If anyone knows, I have to go to their house or flat and get them. Old people go to the shelters far more than the younger ones. You’d think it would be the other way round, wouldn’t you? The warden post is in a room in a basement in Abbey Road (the road that the bus goes along). It is always boiling hot because of the blackout and windows never being open and it smells of coke and we drink tea there waiting for raids. When
we are on duty we wear very scratchy navy blue trousers and jacket and a tin hat with elastic under the chin. Sometimes we have lectures. There was one last autumn about had we noticed that the tops of pillar boxes had all been painted a limey pale green? Of course we had. This was because there was reputed to be some awful new gas the Germans were going to use, and we were told that we would know when they had used it because the pillar boxes would change colour. We all listened quietly, and when the lecturer didn’t say any more, I put up my hand and asked what we were to do about the gas once we knew it was there, and the man said—quite crossly—that there was nothing whatever we could do about it, it was lethal and our gas masks wouldn’t work. I have not told Polly this because she happens to be particularly frightened of gas, but I know I can trust you to keep that kind of secret from her. Polly is thinking of joining up as a warden in spite of my discouraging her. Louise has sent her baby to Home Place because of the V-1s. Since I’ve stopped working for the Bishop I haven’t been doing very much except I typed a play for a friend of Louise’s which I didn’t think was awfully good, but typists are not supposed to have opinions about what they type. Being a warden is taking up more time. We have taken to sleeping in the basement on mattresses now in rows—it’s rather fun except for the silverfish that come out at night. I’ll take you to lots of films in the holidays when you come to stay, and we go for lovely picnics on Sundays to Hampstead Heath or to Richmond Park. Archie sometimes comes with us. He says it is OK about your new school and he’s going to take you to see it. I wish I could come too, but I won’t ask him if you don’t want me to. Louise knows someone who was at Stowe and they told her it was a civilized place and much nicer than most schools, and anyway, I’m sure Archie knows much more than our family about whether a school is bearable or not. I have to agree that our family don’t seem to notice this. I often wonder whether Dad and the uncles had such an awful time that they simply think everyone does and that’s that. Archie is more modern—it is one of the good things about him. Another warning has gone, I’ll have to stop. Please do write to me. I’m not sure that having a shop to sell snakes after the war would be a terrific success because quite a lot of people aren’t keen on them like you. [Then she thought that this was a bit discouraging, so she added,] But I suppose people who’ve been in the army in foreign climes might have changed their views and even miss them, so you may be right.