“He painted a portrait of you, didn’t he? I’ve just remembered.”
“He painted several. I used to stay at Hatton a lot when I was at Oxford. The Judge was a very splendid godfather. Have you got a piano here? We could go and sing sentimental duets. It might cheer you up. You know things like ‘My true love has my heart, and I have his’—pure pale treacle if you ask me.”
“I shouldn’t think people get a chance to ask you much,” she said.
“Ah! That’s my Latin temperament. My mother is French, a tiny little black widow: naturally I call her maman. My father was English, though—some sort of cousin of the Judge. Got badly knocked up in the previous war and died when I was born, so I’ve always been a precocious only child. You aren’t one, though, are you? You come from a very large family, I’m told.”
“Only four of us, but there are a good many cousins.”
“Then you’ll hardly notice one more, will you? Should I go and view your baby?”
“He’s not here. He’s in the country with my family. Because of the V-2s.”
“Oh, well, I can’t, then. Actually, I’m not mad on babies. They’re nearly always damp and they look so depressing. It amazes me that they’re so popular with people.”
“They’re not particularly popular with me,” she said, and felt at once a shade lighter for being able to say it.
“Really! That’s most interesting.” He took her hand. “Poor you having one, then.”
Although he talked—very largely nonsense—most of the time she quickly discovered that he noticed a great deal and was not as inconsequent as he made out. By the time Polly and Clary came back from work, she felt as though she had known him for years and hoped he would stay for weeks. He was immediately popular with them as well, and after a hilarious supper they spent the evening being the Gaumont British News with action and music, no words—Hugo excelled at this game: race commentators, Queen Mary, war reporters, even Mr. Churchill blowing out seventy candles on his birthday cake; when he was not doing these things, he was playing the sporting heroic music with some lavatory paper and a comb.
He stayed about a week the first time, but thereafter, he turned up at irregular intervals, becoming one of the family, and particularly an indefatigable escort for Louise. They went to the Old Vic at the New Theatre; usually, she bought the seats, he never seemed to have any money—largely, she thought afterwards, because he kept giving her presents—he had an eye for good things in junk shops, and once arrived with a Pembroke table that he’d lugged for miles. “It cost nine pounds and is really rather pretty—nicer than that awful old card thing with mothy green baize,” he said. Another time he turned up with his hair slicked forward and a small black moustache.
“Heil, mein Eva!” he cried, enfolding her in his arms. “I just wanted to see what would happen,” he said. “But the people on the bus just looked, and then seemed frightfully embarrassed and looked away. Funny, I thought that ladies would shriek and men would try to arrest me.” On this occasion he was in mufti. “Regulation number one thousand seven hundred and sixty-four stroke five nine is pretty sure to say don’t dress up as the enemy,” he said.
When Michael rang during the first time he was staying and she told him that Hugo was there, he seemed rather deliberately hearty about it. “Good-oh! Sorry I shall miss him. Tell him to behave himself and give him all the best,” was really all he said.
Eventually, they did coincide—for one evening, and she noticed, more sharply than she had before, how the silly house jokes that had evolved withered in Michael’s company; either he sat with a set good-natured smile on his face, or, more embarrassingly, he attempted to cap them, and there was either dutiful laughter, or someone changed the subject. He and Hugo seemed awkward with each other, Hugo attempting to rib him, and Michael snubbing and then being conciliatory. “Why are you in London so much?” he asked Hugo, who replied that he was doing a stint at the War Office.
“Are you living here, then?”
“Well, yes, just while the job lasts. Louise very kindly said I could.”
When they were going to bed that night, Michael said, “I think you might have asked me about Hugo. He can be a bit of a parasite.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you’d be pleased. Anyway, he isn’t being a parasite, he’s always bringing nice things. Those glasses we drank out of at dinner, he brought them and that lovely glass dome with flowers in it. He’s awfully good at picking things up and he always gives them to me—to us,” she amended.
“Well, be careful he doesn’t try to pick you up.”
“That’s an idiotic idea,” she had answered sharply. She had felt angry then—and innocent.
That was round about Christmas time. Her sore throats persisted—they were always worse in winter and were accompanied by depression that she found it harder and harder to conceal.
One evening, Hugo got back early from his office to find her in tears. She’d been trying to paint her throat with some disgusting brown stuff that hurt and she’d put the brush too far down her throat and it had made her sick. He found her hanging over the basin in the bathroom, feverish and in tears. He put her to bed, got her a hot drink and some aspirin and came and sat with her. “I’ll read to you,” he said. “Then you won’t have to hurt your throat by talking.” He was so matter of fact and kind and read to her so beautifully, that she actually began to feel not well, but happy, and fell into a peaceful sleep.
When she woke, he was still there.
“What’s the time?”
“Past the witching hour,” he said. “You’ve had a good long sleep.” He took her temperature and it was nearly normal.
“Have you been here all the time?”
“Most of it. Polly brought me a sandwich. I’ve been reading. But I didn’t cheat and go on with Hadrian. I read something else.”
“Hugo, you are the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
“You are the person I love most that I’ve ever met,” he replied.
There was a complete, trembling silence.
It was not a shock: it seemed the most natural thing in the world. It was what she felt, and she told him.
For a few weeks after that she was conscious of a light-hearted happiness that seemed entirely new to her. When he left to go to work each morning, the knowledge that he would return in the evening sustained her all day. Her energy came back: she decorated the house, she tried far harder to make good suppers (he had an enormous appetite—ate everything in sight and remained bony). Occasionally, she bicycled downtown to lunch with him, coming back uphill in the Edgware Road straphanging on lorries. At weekends they went to junk shops together picking up things for the house—it reminded her of going down Church Street with Polly before the war. Indeed, she felt as though she had suddenly become much younger, was hardly grown up at all: he was her brother, her friend, the best company in the world to her—and she loved him. Once, she took him home to Sussex for the weekend where he was an instant success. She had used to go every two or three weeks to visit Sebastian who was now staggering about and looked exactly like Michael. These visits usually caused her much pain, made her very anxious and guilty: she knew that she was expected not to be able to bear being parted from him, knew, too, that there was no real reason why she should be. She did not have to live in London; it was convenient for Michael to have her there, but secretly she knew that if she had said she must be with their child, he would have agreed to it. It would also have meant prolonged and regular visits to Hatton and that she couldn’t face.
During these weeks there was no talk of love: it was simply taken for granted between them, but she did tell him something of how she dreaded and feared Zee’s animosity. He listened; he knew that she did not like women, he said, so some of all that wasn’t even personal. “And I suppose, after the war, you’ll have Michael to protect you from her,” he had ended. When she was silent, he suddenly blurted out, “But he won’t, will he? He does whatever she wants.”
/> She stared at him, recognizing the awful truth. “Does he? Yes, he does.”
“Louise! I haven’t asked you—swore I never would, but here I am doing it. Do you love him?”
“I don’t know!” she said: “I thought I did, but I don’t know. I feel as though all my feelings are wrong and I ought not to feel them. I try not to have any, but it gets worse and worse. Last time he came up I couldn’t bear to—” Suffused with shame, she could not go on.
He looked at her with love. “I sort of knew,” he said. “Really—from the first day I saw you—” There was a kind of suppressed anguish in the way he said that. He cleared his throat. “Well, anyway, you have me,” he said.
“But I don’t, though, do I?” she cried and then flung herself into his arms. That was the first time that he kissed her, began to kiss her and could not stop; they clung to one another for comfort, for reassurance and then passion, which for her came as a joyful shock, as though her whole body was discovering love for the first time in her life. “So this is what it is!” she said during a lull. “Both people want it.”
“My poor darling. Both people.”
But they did not go to bed. For a few nights, after the girls had gone to bed they met in the drawing room, lay together on the floor in front of the fire locked in each other’s arms, kissing until their mouths were sore and they were exhausted with longing. But it was by some unspoken mutual consent that they did not consummate, and eventually they would creep upstairs, bare-footed and hand in hand, until they reached their separate rooms when they would part without a word.
On a walk the next weekend, he said that they could not go on as they were, and that the only honourable thing for him to do was to speak to Michael. At first she was aghast at the idea, was sure that it could not lead to any good solution, but he was unwavering, and gradually—although she felt very frightened at the prospect—she began to feel that he must be right. After all, she was usually wrong in what she thought and felt; she trusted him, and she also felt that they could not go on as they were. She loved him and he must know better than she.
Michael turned up for a forty-eight-hour leave the following week. She and Hugo had arranged that she would go down to the kitchen to prepare lunch while he talked to Michael.
All that day—the day of Michael’s return—she had existed in a kind of nervous euphoria: she was unable to imagine what Michael’s reaction would be and this was frightening; on the other hand as long as Hugo was there she felt that everything must in the end be all right.
It was not at all long before she heard Michael calling from the top of the stairs telling her to join them. She walked into the drawing room to find them both standing, Hugo by the window—he turned to face her as she came in and she saw that he was very white. Michael stood by the fireplace with his forearm resting upon one end of it; his face was flushed and the moment that he began to speak she knew he was very angry. What he said was breezy, patronizing and dismissive. He’d never heard such nonsense in his life—they were behaving like spoiled children, although he would have thought that Hugo, at least, was old enough to know better (he was a year older than she which made him twenty-three). What on earth was he supposed to say to such an utterly idiotic proposition?—and so on. It was pretty odd if one was away fighting this war, which perhaps they had not noticed was still on, if one came back to find that one’s cousin, who had spent so much time with his family, had been making trouble with one’s wife, and quite extraordinary that she should apparently forget her position …
Here Hugo said, “For God’s sake stop talking about Louise as though she wasn’t there!”
He would stop talking about it altogether, Michael said. It simply wasn’t worth talking about. He must go, or he would be late for lunch.
What lunch? she had asked, before she could stop herself.
Lunch with Mummy and the Judge. He thought he had told her: when Mummy heard how short his leave would be, she had suggested coming to London for the day to see him. Now, given the circumstances, he didn’t feel like taking her with him. He ended by telling Hugo that this was his house and that after what he had been told, he naturally expected Hugo to leave at once. “I shall expect you to be gone by the time I come back. And don’t ever, ever consider coming back.”
When Michael had gone, some of the implications of what they had done began to be apparent to them. He would have to go, he said. He could not possibly stay in Michael’s house after this. It would be thoroughly dishonourable. Could she not go with him? No, he said. He had not enough money to keep her and they had nowhere to live and he was tied to the Army. “I have to send money to the little black widow,” he said. “I wouldn’t have told you, but she hasn’t enough, and that really only leaves me with pocket money.”
Michael was being horrible, she said; she felt then that their honesty should have been in some way rewarded. “We did tell him the truth,” she kept saying. “Or at any rate you did.”
“The truth isn’t always jolly for other people,” he replied. “He loves you, too. You can’t leave that out.”
“How do you know that he loves me?”
“He wouldn’t have been so furious if he hadn’t.”
“We shouldn’t have told him, then,” she said some time later.
“Oh, darling, we should. Anything else would just be lies, deceit—awful stuff …”
During all this they went down to the kitchen to have lunch, but neither of them felt like eating. Hugo said he must pack things up a bit and while they were hunting for his things, and searching for something to put them in, the question arose of where on earth he was to go. He hadn’t thought, he said, he’d find somewhere—she was not to worry about that. But of course she did: could he go to Uncle Hugh, she wondered. But if he did, what reason for it could they give the girls? Thank God they weren’t there that weekend. When he had packed, she thought of Archie. Hugo had met Archie, and they had got on well, Louise thought. “But I don’t know him well enough to go and plonk myself on him,” Hugo said. She did, she said. But when she rang him up, he wasn’t there. By now it was nearly three o’clock, and Hugo said that he’d better just go.
“I can always go to a Turkish bath,” he said. “And on Monday I’ll be able to find someone at work who’ll know somewhere. You really are not to worry about that.”
“But you’ll ring and tell me where you do go?” she had said.
“I’ll ring you on Monday evening—after Michael has gone, I promise.”
The fact that they were to part now impinged. His luggage was in the hall—they did not know when precisely Michael would return and Hugo said he would not risk being told again to go. He put his arms round her and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“It’s a hell of a mess, isn’t it?” he said. There were tears in his eyes.
“Shall I come with you to the bus?”
“Better not, I’d rather say goodbye to you here.”
“I love you so much.”
“You are the person that I love most that I’ve ever met,” he said. He stroked her hair back from her forehead and kissed her again. “Goodbye, dear darling Louise.”
After the front door had shut, she heard the garden gate click. She could not hear his receding footsteps, and the house was silent. She went upstairs to the little room that had been his, flung herself on his bed and cried until her throat ached.
But that was only the beginning of what turned out to be the blackest time of her life.
When Michael came back, she knew, without being told, that he had discussed things with his family—with Zee. He had a kind of cold schoolmasterish resolve now. She was to join him in the port where he was taking command of a new destroyer. She would stay in an hotel there and he would sleep ashore. They would be leaving on Sunday afternoon. And he required only one undertaking from her. She was not to write to or to communicate with Hugo in any way at all. That was to be that. She was so stunned by these arrangements that she agreed—and then
realized that when Hugo rang her on Monday evening, she would not be there. She asked if she might write just one letter to him explaining what was happening, but he said no. “The Judge will make clear to him what is happening,” he said. “It is quite unnecessary for you to do anything about it at all.”
And so, just over twenty-four hours later, she found herself standing in the dark and cavernous hall at the reception desk of the Station Hotel, Holyhead, waiting with listless patience while Michael signed the register and the key to their room was found. The porter then conducted them into the lift, onto the second floor, along a wide dark passage studded with doors, until eventually he stopped in front of one of them, fumbled with the key and opened it. When he had dumped the cases and received his shilling from Michael, he went. They were alone again—more so than in the train where there had been other people and noise.
“I’ll leave you to unpack,” he said when he had washed (it sounded like a concession). “Meet you in the restaurant in half an hour.” The door clicked heavily shut after him. For a moment she simply sat on the side of her bed. Already the place felt like a prison. Her head ached from the long journey in a close smoke-filled carriage: she had slept some of the way because she had not slept the previous night—Michael had insisted that they go out to dinner with another naval officer and his wife. The men had talked naval shop during dinner and the wife had talked about babies and how lucky she—Louise—was to be going to stay in an hotel with her husband safe and sound every night. Then they had gone dancing for what seemed to her hours. She had thought she would be glad that this interminable, awful day was to be over but by the time that Michael, with wordless, perfunctory speed, made love to her (why did people call it that? she wondered) she was unable to sink into oblivion—something else she had been looking forward to all evening. She had lain in the dark rigid and wakeful: she had not stopped thinking of Hugo since the moment that he left, but it was as though the shock of their sudden separation had frozen her heart, had paralysed her thoughts so that all day, all the evening, the pain had seemed distant, she knew that it was painful, but she was out of earshot, as it were. But with Michael asleep, the thaw, the misery began. She missed him, she loved him, she could not imagine how she would get through life without him—it was very like the consuming homesickness that had dominated her childhood. If I could just be with him, she thought, I wouldn’t mind anything else. During that day, and the day after, Michael managed somehow to make her feel guilty about what he called her behaviour; alone, the guilt was easily overwhelmed by her misery. It seemed extraordinary and awful that she should find out about love too late.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 137