“I don’t know what to say. Except—you don’t believe that Rupert is alive really, do you?”
“No, I don’t think I do. It’s too long now. Of course, he might be …” He left that in the air.
“I suppose I feel I ought to believe he is. And I can’t. But I wish I knew. It makes me feel quite—well—oh, well—”
“Angry, I should think,” he said. “Sorry this coffee’s so awful. Would you like a brandy to wash it down?”
The urge to tell him recurred. She said that she would.
She waited until the waiter had brought the drinks before telling him. “I just felt like having dinner with him,” she finished. “You know, it seemed like a bit of an adventure.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that’s bad of me?”
“No.”
“The only thing is that I shall miss the last train.”
He fumbled in his pocket and produced a key. “You can stay with me, if you like. If you turn out to need to.”
“Archie, you are kind. You won’t tell—anyone—will you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
On the steps of the club, he said, “What are you going to do with yourself until your dinner?”
“Oh—I thought I’d try and find a dress somewhere. I didn’t take one to Mummy’s—a suitable one, I mean.” She felt she was beginning to blush.
“And your luggage?”
“I’ve put it in the cloakroom at Charing Cross. Except a very small case.” She’d repacked in the ladies’ at the station, so that at least she had make-up and her best shoes.
“Well, if you want to change at my place, you’re welcome. By the way, do you know my address?”
“What a good thing you said that. I don’t.”
He took out his diary, propped it against a pillar of the portico and wrote it down for her.
“Elm Park Gardens. It’s near South Kensington. Keep my key safe, won’t you? Don’t bother to ring. Just come or not, as the case may be.” He leant down and kissed her cheek. “Have a nice time anyway.”
Afterwards, in a taxi going to Hermione’s shop, she wondered at the way in which he seemed to think she might not come. Did he think she was the kind of person who spent the night with a total stranger with whom she was simply going to have dinner? She felt quite indignant at the thought.
Any doubts he might have had, were, as it turned out, well founded. She spent the night—or what remained of it—in a studio flat in Knightsbridge. “My intentions,” he had said at dinner, “are strictly honourable. I want to seduce you.”
At dinner, that had simply seemed a wild, though flattering, notion; she had had no intention of his succeeding. “I don’t go to bed with people the first time I meet them,” she had retorted.
“And I don’t want to do anything with you that you usually do with people,” he had replied equably.
After dinner, he had taken her to the Astor, where they had more champagne and danced. The dress she had bought at Hermione’s proved a perfect choice, a sheath of soft black silk, cut to just above the knee with a low square neck and wide shoulder straps; it was cool and glamorous and worth, she felt, every penny of its twenty-two pounds. She had availed herself of Archie’s offer to change in his flat, spent a delicious hour and a half bathing and dressing and making up her face, putting up her hair, taking it down again and finally putting it up with the string of pearls—the only jewellery she had with her—twined into the knot on top of her head. She had no scent, no evening bag and only her winter coat to wear over the dress, but it would have to do. At this point, as much as anything else, she was enjoying the whole business of getting herself up for a party and when Archie turned up she paraded before him as though he was a parent to approve her before her first dance.
“My word!” he said. “That’s a dress and a half, or I suppose you could say half a dress. You look extremely pretty in it, anyway. Do you want a drink before you go?”
But she didn’t. She was due to meet him at seven. She left her overnight case with Archie and took a taxi to the Ritz.
He was waiting for her, rose from a sofa, greeted her with a small nervous smile.
“I had begun to imagine you weren’t going to show,” he said.
“You said seven.”
“And here you are.” He took her arm and led her off for a drink.
During drinks and subsequently dinner he asked her dozens of questions—about her family, her childhood, friends, interests, what countries she had been to, what, as a child, she had wanted to be when she was grown up, but these questions were slipped in between others—What food were they to eat? What about food in Britain in wartime? How did she feel about the war? Had she been afraid of the air raids? No, she had answered, she was far more afraid of spiders and he had laughed—his nearly black eyes that were sparkling when, as nearly all the time, they were fixed upon her, softened, he was silent and she was conscious of a momentary, tender affection that went straight to her heart. This happened several times and each time it created a small fresh shock of intimacy.
At the end of dinner, he offered her a cigarette, and when she refused, he said, “I wasn’t sure whether you don’t smoke, or whether you simply don’t accept cigarettes from strange men.”
“You are fairly strange. You don’t tell me much about yourself.”
“I answer your questions.”
“Yes, but …” She knew by then that he was a reporter, a photographer as well, apparently, attached to some part of the American army and that he had been brought up in New York, that he had been married and was divorced (he’d told her that in the train) and that his parents were also divorced. “You don’t tell me anything.”
“What do you want to know?”
But then she couldn’t think. Or, rather, the kinds of things she felt curious about seemed wrong to ask of someone she hardly knew. She felt herself beginning to blush and shrugged.
When the waiter came with the coffee, he asked for a large cup and some hot milk and offered her a liqueur.
“Now,” he said, when the waiter had come and gone again and they were on their own, “I need to ask you something. Is your husband a prisoner?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling. You don’t talk about him at all. That’s unusual. All the time you were talking about your family, you didn’t mention him.”
“It’s because I don’t know what to say.”
There was a short silence, and then he said, casually, “I suppose you could just say what is?”
So she told him. Beginning with Dunkirk, and his getting left in France, and all their hopes of his being taken prisoner, and no word for two years, hopes fading, she had thought he must be dead then, and then the Frenchman arriving with his news and everyone jubilant. And now two more years without a word or a sign.
“He’s never seen his daughter,” she said. “If he hadn’t twisted his ankle jumping into the ditch because of the German lorry, he would have. So I don’t know—anything. I suppose I’ve sort of got used to it.”
She looked up and again met that silent, expressive regard. He said nothing.
“But really, I suppose I’ve come to think that he is dead.”
He was silent for a moment; then he said, “I understand now what you said about getting used to something and still noticing it.”
“Did I say that?”
“In the train, this morning. It’s kind of unfinished, isn’t it? You can’t grieve, and I suppose you can’t feel free—it’s a kind of devilish limbo.”
Yes, she had said. She was thinking how odd it was that he should have used the same word as Archie when all these years no one had said it—the situation had somehow never been discussed, let alone defined.
Then he leaned towards her over the table. “Zoë! Will you come dancing with me?” and before she could answer, he had taken one of her hands before saying, “Off we go then.”
&nbs
p; Much later that night, he said that a night club was the only legitimate way he could think of for taking her into his arms.
They danced for hours. They did not talk very much: in the first few seconds, she found that he was a very good dancer and abandoned herself to following him and thence to anticipating every move that he made. She had almost forgotten how much she loved it: had not danced with anyone since before Juliet had been born. He was barely taller than she—occasionally she felt his breath touch her face—if their eyes met he gave her an absent, dreamy smile. When the band stopped for a break, they went back to their table and drank the champagne that gradually ceased to be cold in its bucket of melting ice. There was a small lamp on their table, on every table, with a dark red shade; it gave enough light for each to see the other but not to discern the features of the people at other tables: it made a kind of romantic privacy as though they were sitting on the shore of a tiny island. Out on the floor the spotlights from the ceiling, which varied in intensity, made the dancers’ faces and the women’s bare shoulders livid; their eyes glittered, diamonds and medals winked and went out as the dancers shifted in and out of pools of smoky light.
The music began again. She turned to him, ready to rise, but he put out his hand to make her stay. “This is when I court you,” he said. “I haven’t told you how beautiful you are because you must know it. You dazzle—you blind me, but you must be used to all that. I’ve been falling in love with you since about eleven o’clock this morning—and that’s a long way down. I got past your appearance hours ago in the restaurant, when you told me about Rupert. You look like the kind of girl who plays games, who tries to turn men on to comfort her vanity. But you don’t do it. I’ve been waiting all evening for any of that and you simply don’t do it.”
“I used to,” she said, suddenly recognizing the change. “I used to.” She stopped—the recollection struck her with a kind of confounding violence. Once, she remembered, her whole satisfaction in such an evening would have rested upon her partner’s responses to her appearance. If these had not been frequent enough to satisfy her vanity, she would have put out little hooks to catch more extravagant compliments. Thoughts of this now revolted her.
“… so, will you? I didn’t mean to ask you like this, but I just have to know.”
She started to say that she didn’t know how she felt, whether she was in love, that they had only just met, but the words crumbled, became meaningless as she uttered them. She fell silent and simply gave him her hand.
When she woke, the next morning, it was light, the telephone was ringing, and there was no sign of Jack. She was drowsy and her limbs ached from so much dancing and making love. She turned to the empty pillow beside her and there was a note: “The telephone will be me. I had to go to work.” Getting out of bed to answer it, she found she was naked, but he had left his dressing gown draped over the chair by the telephone.
“I hate to wake you, but I thought you might need to know the time.”
“What is it?”
“Just after ten. Listen. Can I call you at home?”
“Call? It’s miles away—Sussex, I told you.”
“Telephone—ring, as you say.”
“I think that might be difficult. The only telephone is in my father-in-law’s study and he’s nearly always in it.”
“Can you call me, then?”
“I might be able to. There’s a telephone box in the local pub, but it’s not very private.”
“Can you spend next weekend with me? We can establish communication arrangements then. Could you, do you think?”
“I could try. I’ll have to let you know.”
“This is my number at work. Might have to be rather formal. I’m Captain Greenfeldt in case you have to ask for me. Isn’t this ridiculous? Having to behave like a spy or a wicked child.”
“But we do have to.”
“Are you wearing my dressing gown? I put it there for you.”
“Yes, I am, over my shoulders.”
“Please come for the weekend. I don’t often get them free.”
“I will try. I’ll think of something somehow.”
“You are the only girl in the world,” he said—and then, “I’ve got to go.”
That was the beginning. It was the beginning of lies, inventions (she fabricated an old school friend with three children who constantly invited her to stay). The Duchy looked at her kindly and said she thought the change was doing her good. It was the beginning of coded telegrams, calls made to his office where he was sometimes chillingly formal, but after the first time, he had said he would always call her John when there were other people in his room. She wrote to him at the studio when the gaps between them meeting became unbearable—he wrote back only once. His energy was astounding to her. He worked hard—he frequently went for trips in planes to visit American troops dispersed about the country. When they met, for the rare weekend, they would fall into bed desperate for each other: she realized how starved she had been for love as well as sex. Then they would bathe and dress and he would take her out—occasionally to the theatre, but more often to dinner and then on to dance until three or four in the morning. Back in the studio, a bare place with a piano, a low, rickety divan, a table and two chairs and a huge north window that was always half blacked out, he would undress her slowly, take the pins out of her hair, stroke her and talk to her about making love until she was mad for him. She had forgotten, or perhaps, she thought, she had never known, that aftermath when the body seemed becalmed, its weight so evenly dispersed on the bed that it seemed weightless and sleep took with such an insidious stealth that she was gone before she knew it. Waking on Saturday morning was a voluptuous business; the one who woke first would watch the one asleep with such tender intensity that they could not remain unconscious of it. Lovemaking on those mornings had a different quality—it was light-hearted, playful, full of the intimacies of affection, they felt rich with the prospect of two whole days together—it was the time of purest happiness for her. As autumn became winter, the studio was very cold: there was a stove, but no fuel for it—he grumbled cheerfully about the lack of heating or a shower; there was a small bath with an Ascot that reluctantly provided small quantities of hot water at uncertain intervals. They lunched off tins that he brought from the PX—beef stews, corned beef, turkey in tins, Hershey bars. On fine days they walked all over London while he took pictures—of bombed churches, bombed houses, abandoned shops with sandbagged windows, air-raid shelters, camouflaged anti-aircraft gun sites, the cabmen’s Gothic hut at Hyde Park Corner, where, he said, the cabmen went to gamble—he was a mine of information in that kind of way. “They go to Warwick Avenue if they want a good meal,” he said, “and here to play cards.” And he took pictures of her, dozens and dozens of them, and once, because she said she wanted it, he allowed her to take one picture of him. It wasn’t very good; her hand wasn’t steady enough, and his eyes were screwed up against the sun, but when he had it printed, she kept it in an envelope in her bag. In the afternoon they would go to a movie, she learned to call it, holding hands in the dark. At weekends, in the daytime, he would wear mufti, but in the evenings he put on his uniform. Gradually, she brought clothes up from the country to keep in the studio. They spent Sunday mornings in bed with the papers and he made coffee which he also seemed able to procure. But on Sundays, the shadow of parting was there, and this always seemed to lead to a tension. He was capable of black moods when he became very quiet, agreed with anything she said, but seemed to have withdrawn from her. Once they had a row, about her daughter. He wanted her to bring Juliet up for a weekend with them, but she would not. “She’s too old. She would talk about you—I couldn’t stop her.”
“Would that be so terrible?”
“I think it would be difficult. I can’t tell them about you. They would be shocked.”
“They wouldn’t like the idea of your being in love with a Jew?” It was the first time he had referred to his race.
“Jack, of
course not. It isn’t that.”
He said nothing. They were walking by the Serpentine. It was a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon, and suddenly he flung himself down on one of the iron benches facing the water.
“Sit down—I want to get this clear. Can you honestly tell me that if I were some British—lord or earl or whatever you have here, you wouldn’t take me home to meet your family? By now? We’ve known each other for nearly three months and you’ve never once suggested it.”
“It’s nothing to do with that,” she said. “It’s because I’m married to Rupert.”
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do. It’s because I love you. They’d know that at once, and—and, can’t you see? They’d feel I was betraying him. They would feel I ought to wait in case Rupert does come back.”
“I see. And if he does, that’s the end of us, is it? You’re trying to keep your options open—”
“You aren’t trying to understand me—”
“I’m afraid to. Either it is that, and faced with the choice you’d settle for your upper-class life in a large country house with all those servants rather than risk your luck with a middle-class Jew who doesn’t own anything except a classy camera—or you’ve already got some alternative arranged. You’d marry that friend of his, Archie whatever, and your precious family would approve of that. He goes to stay, doesn’t he? You’ve told me that—and what a member of the family he already is.”
She was shaking with cold, and fear; she had never seen him like this, so angry and bitter and implacable, and, she felt, wrong.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 135