She had thought she would go straight to bed, but the smell of breakfast stopped her and she realized that she was ravenous. No dinner the night before, she remembered.
In the dining room a captain of one of the MTBs in Michael’s flotilla was breakfasting with his wife. She always wore demure frocks with white Peter Pan collars—came up about once a month and Louise had never liked her.
“Goodness!” she called across the room. “You look as though you’ve been out on the tiles! I wondered why your poor husband was all on his own at breakfast.”
“He said to tell you that he had to go to an early meeting,” the husband said.
“Oh. Thank you.” She had hung her dripping coat on the back of the spare chair and was spreading a piece of toast that Michael had left with margarine. It was leathery toast, and the margarine tasted awful but she was so hungry she didn’t care.
“Where have you been? Or can’t you tell us?”
Resisting the urge to invent some wild night of dancing and debauchery, she said that she had been staying with a friend who had had a baby. This silenced Barbara, who murmured something to the effect that she hadn’t thought that babies were much in Louise’s line.
When she had eaten as much breakfast as the menu afforded, she went upstairs planning to have a hot bath and then a sleep. But on the bed was a note from Michael: “Darling. I do hope everything went well. Arthur was so worried, but I’m sure you made all the difference. Shall be back for dinner. Love, Michael.” His confidence that she would have been of some use warmed her as she got out of her damp clothes. Michael had the thickest dressing gown and she decided to put it on while her bath was running as she was beginning to feel shivery. Even her hands were cold. She thrust her hands into the pockets and felt a letter. Pulling it out, she recognized Zee’s writing. She knew that Michael wrote a good deal to her, but her letters went straight to the ship so she never saw them and now she felt curious.
After detailed comment on his naval activities and pieces of news of people barely known to her, the letter was signed “always with love as you know, my dearest one. Mummy.” But there was another sheet of paper.
Just received yours of the 10th and thought you would like to know that Hugo has been sent to join his regiment in Germany, so he is safely out of the way. I do hope, my darling, that this relieves you, as in spite of Pete exacting a promise from him that he would not communicate with Louise in any way you must feel that neither of them are entirely to be trusted. Pete was appalled to hear that he had written in spite of the promise. How lucky that you were able to intercept it. Of course I think you were right to do so—the whole business must have been most distressing for you, as indeed, it has been for me, since any trouble of yours, my darling, becomes mine also. Again—love and blessings. Mummy.
She read this last sheet of paper twice, but the tumult of emotion it evoked was no less from a second reading. Anguish that he had left the country and she had not known it; fear that he would be killed; relief that he had not obeyed the family injunction, but had written to her none the less; an agony of impatience to find and read the letter he had sent; and through all this, rage at the horrible collusion. She began to search for the letter—through his chest of drawers, in the pockets of his clothes hanging in the wardrobe—but she did not find it. The thought occurred that he might have destroyed it, but she could not bear to consider that. She wanted the letter so much that it had to exist—somewhere. When she could think of nowhere else to search, she threw herself on the bed and wept until she had no tears left and her exhaustion overwhelmed her like a fog.
She woke to find Michael standing by her bed telling her that it was dinner-time. “You must have been asleep for hours,” he said.
That was the beginning of the first, and most terrible row that they had ever had. She had read his mother’s letter, she said.
She should not have done that.
Why not? She read other people’s letters.
Silence.
She knew about Hugo. She wanted her letter from him.
That was not possible. He had destroyed it.
After reading it, she supposed.
No. That would be dishonourable. He had simply destroyed it. It was a promise, after all.
She had been made to promise not to write; she had not promised not to receive a letter. It was only one letter, she had pleaded. (She had never had a letter from him; it would have been something to keep—some comfort when otherwise there was none.)
It was much better to make a complete break. She would get over it sooner that way.
How did he know that she wanted to get over it? She loved him. In all these weeks it did not seem to have occurred to him that she loved him.
And what did she think this made him feel? She had loved him—enough to marry him and have their child. Did she not take that seriously? These weeks had not been easy for him either. He had tried to make allowances—knew she was very young. Marriage was difficult when one partner had to be away so much of the time. She would get over Hugo—but it would happen far sooner if she would just make some effort and not give way to everything so easily.
Had he really destroyed her letter?
For God’s sake, yes! He was not a liar—surely she knew that?
He was not a liar, she said, but he did not tell the truth.
That sounded very clever: he couldn’t think what she meant by that.
She meant that he simply didn’t tell her things.
What things?
She couldn’t be bothered to tell him.
Silence.
She looked at him as though she had never seen him before.
“I shall never forgive you for destroying my letter.”
The row, like all the worst rows, did not end here, or, indeed, at any particular moment thereafter; she discovered that the cold resentment with which she had said she would never forgive him had struck him as no pleading, no attempt to say how much it mattered to her, had done. He had been treating her like a child—a badly behaved one—punishing her for her fault, discounting any reason or feeling that might have generated it. She thought then that even his bedding her night after night was some form of punishment, since he did not seem to enjoy himself either. She refused to go down to dinner with him, and when he rejoined her much later in the evening, she pretended to be asleep.
The next morning she woke with a headache, a very sore throat and some fever, and for several days after that, the aftermath of the row was masked by her illness and his efforts to look after her when he was not on duty. He got a doctor, who prescribed the usual horrible throat paint, plus aspirin and the injunction to take plenty of fluids. He also pronounced her tonsils severely infected, and said that, in his opinion, they should come out. Michael brought her books and flowers. “I do love you, you know,” he said. He also suggested that perhaps while she felt so rotten, and was probably pretty infectious, he’d better sleep on board. So for three days she had the bed to herself, although she felt so awful that the days and the nights ran together into what seemed like an endless tract of time when either she was mercifully unconscious or lay in a kind of stupor about Hugo—where was he, when would she ever see him again, was he missing her, did he indeed still love her? But what would be the good of it if he did? She was married to Michael, and she had a child, so nothing could really be changed. Most of the time she felt too weak to think about any of this, and when she cried, it was about not having his letter—it was as though she no longer expected to see him.
Michael came before dinner each evening giving her news of various kinds. “The Allies are closing in on Berlin,” and “I rang Home Place and your mother says Sebastian has cut two more teeth and the new nanny is a great success. She sent her love and hopes you’ll soon be well again, darling.”
On the fourth evening, he suggested she get up for dinner.
“I’ve asked the new Number One from Martin’s boat to join us. Do you good, darling, to have a litt
le company. You can pop off to bed immediately afterwards.”
So that was when she first met Rory. They had a long talk about Oscar Wilde, and she liked him at once.
Polly
1945
In the year—or a bit more—that she’d been in Louise’s house she had managed to make her little attic room more or less how she wanted it to be. She had got rid of the paper and its clouds with seagulls stuck onto it and painted the walls a rich green. Then she had painted the furniture white. The result was airy and refreshing to look at, although in summer, the room being next to the roof, and only furnished with one small Gothic ace-of-clubs window, it was still rather stuffy; she had to sleep with the door open to make some kind of draught. And in winter, of course, the reverse was true: it quickly became the coldest room (except for Clary’s, which was identical next door) in the house. It was Hugo who suggested that she hunt for an old kilim carpet to hang on one of the long walls to warm things up, and she went to one of the big markets and eventually found just the thing: threadbare in places but beautiful with oranges and pinks and browns in it. After that, she kept finding things and changing the room until it felt exactly right. Hugo was awfully good at making things look nice and he even seemed to get Louise interested because the drawing room got a lot less impersonal. It was Hugo who had helped her to make a simple shelf to run down the other wall on which she could put her Delft candlesticks and other pieces of china she had acquired over the years. “I suppose you’re falling in love with him,” Clary had said rather accusingly after she had come to inspect the shelf.
“No. That’s the whole point. He’s just like one of us. There’s none of that worrying stuff.”
She was alluding to the confounding regularity with which men she encountered seemed to fall in love with her. In the last year she had had (or felt she had had) to change her job three times in order to escape everyday encounters with people who had expressed undying love for her. They always began by asking her out and, to date, she had always been taken in by their deceptively casual manner. Even if she didn’t particularly want to, she never had the heart to say no. The first evening, or lunch, or walk, or cinema or whatever it was, was usually all right: they told her a lot about themselves and ended by saying how much they had enjoyed talking to her. But by the third, or even, once, the second time, the climate had changed, was thundery with suppressed emotion until the cloudburst of their declarations. On top of that, she had Clary’s inquisition to face afterwards. “As absolutely nobody proposes to me, you must tell me. All novels have proposal scenes in them. I really need all the material I can lay my hands on.”
She could no more say no to Clary than she could to anybody else so she went patiently through the declarations, the proposals, the subsequent alleged ruination of the proposer’s life …
“Honestly, Poll, you’re a bit of a menace. I know you don’t mean to be, but the fact is you are. It can’t just be because you’re so frightfully pretty, it must be some ghastly weakness in your nature.”
“I know it must. But it is such a worry. And sometimes a bit boring.”
“It wouldn’t be boring if you loved them back.”
Before she could stop herself she said: “I shall never do that.”
“Well, why don’t you invent someone you’re engaged to? You could wear your emerald ring on the right finger as a sign.”
“Would that work, do you think?”
“Except with absolute cads it would. And even you ought to be able to tell which they are.”
“Oh, no,” she said sadly. “I’ve no idea how to tell which they are. You invent someone, then.” She knew that Clary loved that kind of thing.
“Right. Well, he’s about twenty-five with wonderful thick curly hair and he’s fairly arty but also good at games and he’s been madly in love with you ever since he first saw you—oh, yes, like Dante he first saw you when you were nine (that shows how much in love he is) and when you were eighteen, he asked your father for your hand and naturally ever since then you’ve been engaged.”
“Surely I would have got married by now, wouldn’t I?”
“No—because of the war. Your father said you had to wait until the end of the war. How’s that?”
“I don’t care whether he’s good at games—it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me.”
“But you don’t mind him being arty?”
“No, I don’t mind that. I wouldn’t want him with fair curly hair. I prefer dark hair on men.”
“I never said he had fair hair.”
“Well, I don’t like curls. And I think he should be older.”
“Thirty, then.”
“Older than that.”
“How old?”
“Round about forty, I thought.”
“Don’t be so stupid, Poll. You couldn’t possibly be engaged to someone of forty!
“I don’t see why not. Mr. Rochester. Mr. Knightly,” she offered.
“Jane and Emma were both older than you are. You’ve completely spoiled my person. Nothing’s the same. I can’t think why you asked me at all.”
“Well, he’s still a painter.”
“I never said painter! I said arty. You’re beginning to make him sound like Archie!”
“Of course I’m not!”
“Forty, dark, unsporty, a painter. It sounds exactly like him.”
“Well, it wouldn’t matter if it was, would it? I mean, it’s all a made-up business.”
“I think it would matter.” She thought for a moment and then added, “Archie might not like it.”
She didn’t reply. She had a sudden urgent desire to be alone, which was difficult because they were both making a special supper to welcome Louise back from Anglesey. She finished slicing the cooking apples and put them in the pie-dish ready for the pastry that Clary was making—she was the best at pastry. Then she remembered that Clary was always touchy if her advice was not precisely taken.
“OK,” she said. “You’re probably right. So he’s twenty-five, with curly hair and I’ve known him for ages and he’s always been in love with me.”
“And you with him. Otherwise he’d be just like they are.”
“And me with him. What’s his name?”
“Henry Ascot,” Clary said, her good humour entirely restored.
Louise came back. She looked pale and somehow older, Polly thought. She didn’t have much to say about her stay: except that hotels were boring and there hadn’t been much to do. She was glad to be back, though. She was going to try and get a job with the BBC, reading poetry or something, and now that the V-2s seemed to have abated, she thought she would get Sebastian and his nanny back. Otherwise, she wouldn’t know him at all, she said.
It wasn’t until they’d all gone to bed that she was alone and by then she had become nervous about what any examination of herself might uncover. For months now, almost since she had come to live in Louise’s house, she had lived a secret double life, one with her family and the people she met and worked with, and one that contained only herself—and him. This second life was hardly a life since there was no continuity to it; it was more like playing selected pieces of film again and again. It had started by recollection of real life events; like the first time he’d invited her to have supper with him on her own, without Clary. “I don’t get enough of either of you when you are together,” he had said. Quite soon she had dropped the “either” from this memory. Then when he had advised her to go to an art school. “You have talent,” he had said. “I don’t know enough to know what direction that will take you in, but if you don’t go and learn more about it you won’t know either. I don’t want you wasting yourself.” The first time she told him about Mr. Fairburn at work proposing to her. “Well, Poll, you are immensely pretty and attractive, so you must expect that kind of thing.” “Other people don’t seem to have so much trouble,” she had said—pushing it. “Well, other people probably aren’t as pretty as you are.” But she had fished for that complim
ent so it hadn’t been as good as the unsolicited ones were.
Then, one time—it was after Clary had borrowed her silk blouse and then spilled salad dressing on it—she had complained to him about the way that Clary kept borrowing things and then ruining them, “especially if she’s spending the evening with you,” she had said, and he had given his little snort of laughter and said that Clary regarded him as a sort of substitute father, which was why she wanted to look her best for him. “Whereas, as you have a perfectly good father of your own, you can regard me simply as a kind of uncle, and one doesn’t have to take anything like as much trouble over them.”
After that, she dropped pure memories and started to make things up.
The fantasies, which began tentatively (What would it feel like if he put his arms round her? If he told her that he longed to see more of her? If he asked her if she would mind mending his shirt?), gradually became bolder, but they were inhibited, she discovered, by the increasing disparity between what she thought about him when he wasn’t there, and what actually happened when he was. Thus, after a tensely romantic evening with him enjoyed by her in her green and white bedroom where he told her how he thought about her all the time that she wasn’t with him, he kissed her (they had reached the kissing stage) and then they had settled down to a luxuriously despairing discussion of what kept them apart—she was not sure what this was, but there must be something, the course of true love not running smooth and all that—it was quite difficult to meet him outside at Tottenham Court Road tube station and, after a cheerful peck on the cheek, be asked for all the family news, and told, as he limped briskly ahead of her down the windy street, to “Hurry, Poll, or we’ll miss the trailers.” Sometimes she felt herself blushing, when, so far as he was concerned, there had been nothing to blush at. The last time she had seen him, he had been full of the Americans sinking Japan’s biggest battleship and when she had asked him why it was so important, he had said that as soon as the war in Europe was over, it would all be shifting to the Pacific, “the Navy, anyway. The Yamamoto is a bit like knocking out the Queen in a game of chess.”
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 139